


Saintlike

by royalblues



Category: Bandom, Panic! at the Disco, Young Veins
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Boarding School, Dysfunctional Family, I probably should've flagged this as explicit, M/M, Sexual Content, Slow Build, Slow Burn, which one is it again?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-29
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-02-19 05:23:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 86,482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2376302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/royalblues/pseuds/royalblues
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Brendon Urie's attempt to flee the prestigious boarding school Saint Franklin's lands his teacher in a coffin and himself trapped at the school until he meets the new teacher, Mr. Ross, and seizes a unique opportunity for escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> To Paola, for whom I wrote this: I'm sorry your student/teacher prompt spun so out of control. Beta'd by [frenqers on tumblr](http://frenqers.tumblr.com). While I in no way imply that this is anything but a work of fiction nor condone behaviour such as (ab)using one's position of authority to sleep with someone underage, I sure as hell had fun working on this story.

#####  _"There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do."_ —  
 _John Steinbeck, Grapes of Wrath_  


Like most other boarding school students, I had plotted out the death of my least favorite teacher. Of course I never expected the man to die, but that particular Sunday I stood on school grounds and watched the casket that contained the earthly remains of my English teacher, Mr. Sharp. The thing stood enthroned less that five feet away from me; it was a colossus made of thin oak planks, bought with the money in the frequently used emergency money-box of Saint Franklin's Boarding School, and its antiquated cumbersomeness matched the person inside it.

The ceremony was supposed to be solemn and resemble those in churches, but the calla lilies and mournful faces looked as out of place in the rust-colored hills as I felt. The sun reflected off the tear-stained face of recently widowed Dorothy Sharp, whose sobs and wailing sounded higher than anything else in a ten mile radius.

A rather unfortunate string of occurrences transpired six days ago and ruined my plans of an easier future. To some extent, depending on how you choose to look at it, that made her tears my doing.

I subdued the thought and glanced behind me at Spencer in his black uniform, who loosened his tie and wiped away sweat from his brow every ten seconds. All of us wore black uniforms and stared either at the ground or in the direction of Mrs. Sharp or texted our friends about The Tragic Demise of Our English Teacher.  
Some said that he smashed into cliffs, others that an until then undiscovered part of the piranha family had gnawed off his face. If that was the case, Mrs. Sharp had at least had the presence of mind to choose a closed casket.

The obnoxious voice of headmaster Levi Daniels resonated above the audience: “Townspeople. Students, friends, colleagues, bakers, mechanics, all acquaintances of Peter Sharp. Many loved him and even more admired him. He treated his students with respect –”

Yeah right, and the pope secretly engages in gay sex and my parents love me. Of course. I snorted and Spencer snorted, and behind a bouquet of lilies even the kitchen personnel snorted.

Headmaster Daniels continued his speech: “and he cared greatly for teaching them his subject. Peter always had time for those in need, and he spent countless hours counseling our dear students. Many of them have lost their favorite teacher, in fact some have lost the only paternal figure in their life. We citizens have lost a beloved colleague, a treasured friend and...”

His words slowed into the hum of a TV on commercial break: futile and phony like the rest of him.

“Jesus,” Spencer breathed in my ear, right above the itchy shirt collar.  
“Yeah, what about him?” I whispered back, ignoring Mr. Carden's deep-set frown. He wasn't usually one for scolding me either, so I probably should cease my disrespectful muttering.

“Everyone at school hates Sharp – sorry, hated – so how did they come up with this crap?”

I didn't reply. For some reason my eyes drifted to the sea behind town, to the place where Sharp had died a few days earlier. He could have drowned or broken his back on the cliffs in the storm. The weight of his boat could have crushed him, but no one else was around when it happened and even I didn't know the exact events. By now the police had written it off as an accident, announcing to the relatives and the townsfolk how “Peter Sharp set out on the wrong day and the storm caught him.”

“It could happen to anyone, so what a shame this tragic destiny befell one of the best of us,” said Daniels. As his eyes regarded the audience in front of him, his chin turned upward and his alcohol-yellow teeth bared in something that might have been a smile forty years ago. Underneath the wispy locks of gray that infested his scalp, his face was riddled with wrinkles and grief, though the cause of grief was more likely the expenses of the funeral than it was the loss of his 'treasured colleague'.

Spencer flicked a snail off his chair. Someone yawned behind us, setting off a choir of bored pubescent boys.

Then, finally, Daniels said “may Peter Sharp rest in peace and God grace him with his love” and the school choir chimed in with a hymn we never used for anything other than ceremonies like this one. Not that a lot of teachers die around here, it was just a terrible accident for which I was to blame. Forget it, that's what I told myself, forget his existence and you'll forget what happened. So I popped a piece of chewing gum in my mouth.

My eyes searched the crowd to see which faces were actually mourning, and which had only put on their mask of compassion for the town to admire. Not every citizen had shown up: only us students at the school, those who called themselves friends of Sharp (a maximum of three people), and the elderly who had nothing else to do on a Sunday after church.

My old English teacher had not been a man of faith. Rumor had it that the only thing resembling a will found between his papers was a faded yellow post-it with the words _please don't bury me near that dreadful church_ and a form that documented his resignation of membership from said church. The teachers were no longer religious, but superstition concerning the events of Sharp's death thrived around our school and the nearby town anyway.

Townspeople said “it was God's will” and “I'm certainly selling _my_ boat” in the diner and the stores and the streets, but no one had the nerve to speak about it at the funeral.

Between the gaping mouths praising Jesus in motley baritones and sopranos, the wishing Sharp peace in the afterlife, the muttering and texting and the smacking of my bubblegum, I noticed someone. At first it was funny to think of this unannounced visitor as death concealed in the shadows, but there were no shadows in midday Arizona, and the stranger was human, though he did look as ill-placed as the calla lilies. He stood on the other side of the casket and fidgeted with a button on his suit, as if he was too bored to keep up the facade of mourning.

He had to be younger than thirty, and no one younger than thirty would ever go to Peter Sharp's funeral unless someone forced them. Especially if they were from out of town. Maybe he was Sharp's son? But he looked nothing like my old teacher, who had been short and so fat that the school board ordered an extra large casket for his corpse. This guy's head stuck up a few inches between the retirees and adolescents, but was bent toward the ground, shielding him from my view. Tendrils of hair curled above the collar of a cheap paisley shirt, which pasted to his chest with sweat. Had he run all the way from town to the fields surrounding the school? He looked up, remembered his place and motioned for me to keep my eyes on the casket.

Ashes to ashes.

Dust to dust.

A choir of birds replaced the mumbled hymn.

Daniels threw three spoons of dirt on top of the casket, burying Peter Sharp and the circumstances of his death along with him. As the audience scattered into smaller groups and we marched toward the school, I lost sight of the stranger. While walking, I considered the quality of caskets. The downfall of poorly constructed ones is the cheap wooden lid, which is easy to break through if secrets wants to escape, and secrets have a tendency to do so. If only they would stay in there while I finished the semester.

.

### 

.

After dinner I went to Headmaster Daniels' office. The other seniors had arranged a quiz night, but I assumed Daniels was out to get me, probably wanting to discuss me not bothering to hand in any of my homework since Thanksgiving. Usually it would have been Sharp's job to do so, but you already know why that could never happen.

The door was slightly ajar, and voices sounded from the office: one hushed and tinged with something akin to embarrassment as Daniels approached the topic of wage. I stepped closer for a better view and spotted…the paisley guy? Yeah, that was him in the Charleston chair.

The cigar smoke definitely belonged to Daniels, who always attempted and failed to cloud the sooty part of the otherwise pristine ceiling. I heard it stemmed from a fire that had apparently started at the grandfather clock and spread toward a spot from which there hung a grandiose lamp. But Daniels seemed disinterested in telling his guest the thrilling saga of how four boys broke into his office and started a small fire with his precious aged wine and a bunch of failed English essays back in '92. What a shame. I enjoyed that story.

Then they mentioned me, and my hand hovered above the handle, waiting.

“I'm sorry he's late; I'm certain there's a good explanation,” said Daniels.

The fireplace crackled, but the paisley guy wore a tweed jacket and a woolen scarf, which might have been necessary in the place he came from, but now proved a sign of his reluctance to be there. That made two of us, at least.

“Is he usually on time?” He looked at his nails instead of Daniels.

“When he feels the engagement is important, yes. I'm sorry you have to deal with this on your new job, but it is custom tradition at Saint Franklin's that we grant each student a contact person; an adult to whom they can turn when they're so far away from home. We pride ourselves on both our academic standard as well as our care for the students.”

“I know, I read the folder,” said the new teacher.

Was this guy's voice always that monotone?

Daniels began explaining the thing with the students and the tutoring, straying away from me in particular, so I pressed down the handle and strapped on my anarchism and the facial expression that said Levi Daniels could go fuck himself.

Then, voice shaky and fingers slipping on the moisture pearls that rolled down the whiskey glass, my new paisley-wearing English teacher mumbled “what did you say his name was again?”, and it was about time I stepped in there and introduced myself.

The polished oak door was too heavy to just slam open, so I had to kick it. My shoe left behind a footprint, and the noise caused both the men in the office to glare at the door and my entry, Daniels with a furious expression and the new teacher with an incredulous, almost anxious one.

I slung my bag on a dainty table where it knocked over a picture of a twenty year younger Daniels and the governor of Arizona. I didn't bother to pick it up again. “He didn't,” I said to the new teacher. “He forgets important stuff like students' names and budgeting for new chairs that don't break under us. I'm Brendon Urie.”

The teacher opened his mouth but said nothing. He looked at me in a way I think could be described as ogling before he looked at Daniels, still opening and closing his mouth like he forgot how to breathe or something.

“Is anything the matter?” Daniels took another swig of whiskey, then eyed his employee.

“No, I just... I've heard the surname before.”

I grabbed the nearest chair and dragged it next to the Charleston. Quite a feat when you consider that every chair in this room was twice my weight and smelled like a dog dead from alcohol poisoning. “Of course you have. I'm the wonder-child of Nevada's great Governor Urie. If you're at all interested in politics, you've seen his shitty campaign run all over TV.”

Still he didn't look at me, just at Daniels and the whiskey on the table in front of us.

Then Daniels had the nerve to say “Brendon's parents, his father in particular, have demanding jobs and Brendon needs a role model of sorts. And you're the perfect man for the job, what with your youth and great grip on the kids.”

I threw my feet on his precious glass table where it knocked over the teacher's whiskey glass. Whatever. It wasn't like he would drink it anyway.

“Feet down, Urie,” Daniels' bushy brows sunk so far down on his face, they nearly dragged his eyes to the corners of his nose.

“Make me,” I said, enjoying the way Daniels' fists twitched as he placed them flat on the table, probably to avoid hitting me. I'd fucking dare him to, to see how much havoc one small punch could wreck. Maybe they'd fire him or send me away. At least something would happen, but Daniels never touched me, and all three of us sat there in a weird contempt for the situation. I was way out of line, even compared to my usual behavior, but the look on Daniels' face lit up some abstract rage inside me that no extinguisher could eradicate.

Daniels took a deep breath and bared his nasty incisors at me. I bet he never brushed his teeth with anything but dry Vermouth. “This is your new tutor and Literature professor, Mr. Ross. He used to lecture at university level, so rest assured that even if Peter Sharp has passed away, your lessons will still be of their usual quality.”

Okay, the guy next to me was called Mr. Ross. He didn't look like one; he looked like he had a long, fancy name. Maybe he had eighty middle names, I mean, if you didn't have at least one, you weren't rich enough to attend this sanctum of white upperclass masculinity.

I stopped listening to Daniels, who blabbered on about the importance of discipline, and how refreshing it was to have a younger staff member teach Literature, which tended to be a dry subject. Please, no matter who taught the class, I would never fall in love with the Brontë sisters and the waste of paper their books truly were.

Mr. Ross resisted rolling his eyes, something I only noticed because my muscles had twitched the same way, suppressed the same action so many times. Believe it or not, I knew how to be polite. I just didn't want to be.

Daniels sipped his drink from an impressive crystal glass as thick as the matching ashtray to his left. It was a wonder he never mistook the two and caught a mouthful of ash, but if he did, it explained the yellow state of his teeth. 

I studied the mahogany panels and the portraits of the previous headmasters of the school, all of which had mustaches as impressive as Levi Daniels'. My crossed arms and splayed position provoked not only Daniels and the pumping vein on his forehead, but apparently also Mr. Ross, who had scooted away from me. Not by that much, but far enough that I noticed and wondered why. The obligatory purple tie felt like a noose around my neck, and the smoldering heat of the fire made three undone buttons seem too few.

Daniels downed the rest of his drink with a loud gulp. The longer you spent with him, the more you had a feeling that he needed all kinds of alcohol to get through the day. He raised himself with wrinkled hands supporting his seventy-something year old body.

“You will find that some of the students need less help than others. I'll leave it up to you how you divide your time and resources between the five we have assigned to you. As is custom here at Saint Franklin's, you may find parental meetings necessary. If possible, I too will participate in them.” Daniels' voice trailed off and dissolved along with the cigar smoke. “I'm going to dinner now. I will have that timetable printed out for you.”

Mr. Ross shook his head. He motioned to get up and leave, and I was about to leave and get some dinner myself when I froze in an awkward position hovering above the chair.

“I wanna talk to him,” I said. Then I sat down again. My feet resumed their provocative position on the table. Both Mr. Ross and headmaster Daniels looked at me like I had confessed to loving German poetry. Daniels was the first to regain his composure, or whatever it was he used to keep his face so stiff and grumpy all the time, and he left us alone after he had picked up his beloved photograph and the shattered glass around it.

When I had Mr. Ross alone, I leaned back into the chair and tipped my head back to look at the sooty spot above the desk. He could brace himself for a conversation about stressful school-work or parents who 'just didn't understand', or maybe how inane Headmaster Daniels was. I definitely had a lot to say about the latter, but decided to save it for some other time.

“What exactly did you want to talk about?”

To some degree he had a pleasant, melodious voice, but right then it sounded bored, even irritated. It could have been the heat or the depressing office, but it was probably me, still smacking bubblegum and having my feet up on the table. He should know better than to address me in that tone. One phone call to my parents and I could threaten them into getting him fired and substituted by another Peter Sharp. 

But I'd rather avoid talking to them altogether. Besides, a plan was forming in my head, and it involved my new English teacher staying at the school for a little longer than twenty four hours.

“Nothing,” I said without opening my eyes. “But I have a calculus morning class, I haven't done my homework for. This is a good excuse for why not.”

For a while we sat in our separate bulky leather chair, me with closed eyes, tapping out melodies on the mahogany desk until Mr. Ross tersely asked me to stop.

I cracked my knuckles and tapped my toes instead, fully aware of how much it pestered him, so I intensified the tapping and cracking until Mr. Ross looked on the edge of reaching out and slapping me. I creaked open one eyelid and looked at him, at his crinkled slacks and the woolen scarf about to slip from his neck and onto the floor. The fire caused tiny beads of sweat to roll down his temple. “Why are you here?”

He turned toward me, brow furrowed and hands folded tight in his lap, and said “what do you mean?”

“The headmaster said you used to be a professor at some university, so why did you give that up to teach high schoolers about Dickens?”

“I wasn't a professor, I was an associate professor.”

I straightened in the chair and took my feet off the table, where a rim of dirt from my shoes had gathered on the glass surface. Ignoring the portrait of headmaster Daniels who scolded me from the wall, I swept the dirt onto the carpet. 

To create a form of confidentiality, I tried to fixate the new teacher's gaze, but it kept flitting away from me and onto the desk or the paintings. I said “it sounds the same to me,” because it did, and his eyes strayed back to mine. “I know the salary here ain't that good and none of the students are all that bright. This school runs on the after-taste of its past glory. So why did they fire you at that college?”

“They felt I wasn't mature enough to give lectures at university level,” he said stiffly.

“You look plenty mature to me. My granddad wears suede patches, too. Or he did before he died, but I'm pretty sure we buried him in a jacket like yours.”

For a moment the corner of his mouth curled up a little, and I thought I really had him, but then he scoffed and said “how I dress has nothing to do with my academic capabilities. I'm here because _you're_ supposed to get a little smarter during the next months, and, well, I do enjoy challenges. Who was I to deny this opportunity?” He smoothed his crinkled jacket and removed a piece of lint from his scarf. The room felt visibly colder, though the fire still crackled away. If he had to teach here, he needed a change of attitude toward the students, or they would butcher him in class. We would. I might actually help them if he kept talking to me like that. It would only obstruct my the idea that formed in my head that very moment, but, well, I loved challenges, too.

I jumped off the chair and grabbed my backpack from the smaller table. As I passed the liquor cabinet, I snagged something called Glenfarclas that had yet to be opened and placed it in my bag. I just stuffed it in there and Mr. Ross said nothing. I helped myself to Hennessy, electric blue Bombay Sapphire, a bottle of Cointreau, and a bottle of peach schnapps just because I could (and because men Daniels' age shouldn't drink anything so fruity). Then I turned to assess Mr. Ross, his jacket in particular, then his checkered pants and the place the two clothing items met, before I lifted a single eyebrow.

I had no killer line for the end of our meeting, just a slightly spiteful pronunciation of his surname, so that's what I said, I said “then good luck with that... Mr. Ross.”

This recently hatched plan of mine had plenty of flaws already.

.

### 

.

Students at Saint Franklin's were supposed to lie in their beds at ten in the evening, but none fell asleep before midnight. The last light to be switched off was always the one in me and Spencer's room.

Right after the room had gone fully dark, and I could no longer see him, Spencer asked: “what's the new teacher like?”

I rolled over and nearly off the bed with a groan. “Why do you ask that now? You've had all day to find out and the hall guard checks on us in like, two minutes.”

“I don't know, he's your new tutor and all. And you spent the whole evening in Daniels' office. Maybe you actually had a personal conversation you didn't want to talk about in front of the guys.”

I sighed and rolled over on my back to watch a colony of spiders hatch in the corner of the ceiling. “Daniels spent fifty minutes talking about what a great teacher he had hired. Then he left and we talked about his outfit.”

“Daniels? Did he wear anything else but his suit? The one that makes him look like a walrus?”

“No, stupid, the teacher's. His name is Mr. Ross. I swear, he dresses like the fifth member of The Beatles.”

“Maybe he's Ringo in disguise,” Spencer offered.

“No, he's way too young. And he's kind of rude.”

A low chuckle sounded from the other bed. “Did he insult your enormous intelligence?”

I threw a chocolate bar at him, but it hit the wall to the left of his headboard. “I'm not stupid, I just have better things to do than stick around this fucking school. You know that. I thought you wanted to leave, too.”

Maybe that was too harsh a blow, because the chuckles stopped and the figure of Spencer's hand gripped the edge of his bed. Every time I mentioned us deserting, it turned into a heated discussion. Labored breathing came from the other bed; Spencer was working himself up again, ready to present his great list of arguments as to why our steady presence at Saint Franklin's was my fault. I mean, it kind of was, but I already knew. He made it no better by rubbing it in my face.

“We could get a second chance, Spence, but you gotta plan it with me. I don't want to leave alone, where would I go?”

I could account for one of these conversations in twenty seconds. First Spencer would reply in a tired tone, bringing Jon into the conversation. The name turned it into an argument where Spencer remained still but smoldered with anger. Christ, it had been less than a week but we'd already fought about it at least ten times.

“If you called Jon and explained –”

Yeah, there it was. Why couldn't he just leave it alone? “You know what, I can't, because you told him it was all my fault, and now he won't talk to me.”

Then I'd get so frustrated I'd start pacing around the room and list my arguments for leaving behind this shit-hole. How disgusting the food was, even though it was delicious on Mondays and Thursdays. Next up the insolent teachers, who Spencer actually liked most of because he was such a nerd and did well in classes. Then the pathetic students, even our friends, even Gabe and Pete and William, hell even Ian (though he wasn't so much a friend as he was just a guy who stopped by our room occasionally). Friends we would lose after senior year ended anyway. How much we hated the classes, the campus and the townspeople. Really, it was all about how much I hated them, but the 'we' guilted Spencer to silence.

But that night I was tired, so I let Spencer throw his greatest punch, “there's never anything good enough for Brendon the giant fucking primadonna, is there?” Sometimes he suggested that I flee the school and become a Broadway actress, but I'd only roll my eyes and say “you're not taking this seriously! God, just forget it.”

If these fights occurred at night, Spencer was unable to fall asleep and in the morning he would be tired and even more prissy than the night before. He would yawn himself through the first three lections and sneer at me. Even though I wasn't to blame every time, I felt guilty for it. So what if it was my fault; at least I tried to make up for it, and what did Spencer do except mope around and deliver jabs at me? Nothing.

I thought about drawing in a breath for a round of “I thought we were friends, I still like you, we'll get out, I swear,” but the noise outside liberated me from further arguments.

“Hall guard is here soon, just pretend you're asleep,” said Spencer before he pulled the covers up over his ears and surrounded himself in a cocoon of no responsibilities.

I turned back toward the wall. “Sure, pussy out again. You always do,” I muttered.

Outside, the hall guard checked our door to ascertain that no students had escaped during the night.


	2. Chapter 2

Monday morning I watched my new English teacher arrange the papers on his desk again and again, in a pile that couldn't possibly get any neater. A stack of books lay on the desk as well, but the sun caught their covers, so I couldn't tell which novel it was. Not that it mattered. Some old classic, undoubtedly. Boring, written in the mid forties and impossible to get through without falling asleep.

Don't get me wrong; I liked reading, at least before high school suffocated any desire to open a book again, but I only ever managed a few pages before one of my friends called or my mom served dinner and I forgot to pick up the book again.

Mr. Ross put down the papers and monitored the clock above the door, waiting for the last students to flock through and settle in their respective chairs like sheep in a paddock. Ready to be sheered of their integrity and force-fed with the thoughts of a past century. When silence descended upon the room, he cleared his throat and spoke: “all right, can someone tell me what you've read so far this year?”

Spencer raised his hand, and the entire class turned to look at him.

“Yeah, you?”

Spencer removed his chewing gum and stuck it under the table. “It all says so in the curriculum we follow. Mr. Sharp had one; it should be in the desk.”

“That's true.” Mr. Ross checked the clock again and sighed as if he regret his employment and counted the minutes until the next train left and he could jump on it. I often did that during English classes myself. He continued: “but I thought I'd get to know my students by asking you the questions. Just to make sure who pays attention in class. What's your name?”

“Spencer Smith, sir.” Someone in the far right of the class disguised laughter as a cough in the sleeve of their blazer.

Mr. Ross tittered a bit in surprise over being called 'sir'. At least I hoped that was why, because if he thought Spencer intended the suffix respectful, we might have caught ourselves a mental case for a teacher. “You don't have to call me sir, any of you. I'm not even twice your age. You can call me, uh, Mr. Ross. I don't really know how you do it in high school. Your choice, whatever fits.”

At the table next to mine, Joe said “aren't you supposed to be a high school teacher? Why don't you know this stuff?”

Someone asked “Are you even a real teacher?”

“Where are you from? Europe?”

Another yelled “when is lunch?”

to which Gabe replied “your mom's gonna cook it when I'm done with her.”

Spencer plugged in his earphones and sank onto the table. When I'd woken up that morning, he had already gone to breakfast and we hadn't spoken. Dark circles showed under his eyes, but he had snatched the last pancakes at breakfast right in front of me, and if he insisted upon acting like a girl on her period, I wouldn't care the slightest.

I turned to our teacher again. My front row seat granted me a prime view of the sweat-pearls on his upper lip. He swallowed, but the sound drowned in the classroom commotion.

While my classmates proverbially butchered Mr. Ross before my eyes, I was oscillating between amusement and concern at the sight of his reaction. In one languid motion I stretched in my seat, but left my right hand in the air, purposely dangling my wrist to make sure no one thought I actually _wanted_ to participate in class. I stretched a little farther and yawned to catch his attention.

He looked on the verge of storming out of the room with his scarf and ridiculous tweed jacket in a flurry after him. I wouldn't mind that, but the school board, lead by Number One Nitwit Levi Daniels, would only replace him with another teacher. At least this guy brought a change of, if nothing else, the couture around school. When we weren't wearing uniforms, you can imagine the kind of fashion high school boys with too much money prance around in.

If Mr. Ross stormed out of the room and the school before I could get my hands on him, I'd have to stay in these rooms with these students and these grades and this brain, not to mention the ghost of Mr. Sharp haunting my head, so the sooner, the better, you know.

“Uh... Urie? Do you have anything to say?” The ocean of noise swallowed up the question and continued to roar around us: questions about Math and Philosophy and William's new car with calfskin seats.

Did no one ever teach him that the most important rule when dealing with wild animals is not to let them smell your fear?

I said: “why don't you tell the class about yourself? We're all so... curious about your teaching history.”

Let him brag about his professorship, earn a little credibility in his notebook; he'd remember me for being the student who saved his ass the first day. I had to do something to make up for my behavior on the previous day.

Mr. Ross looked only momentarily relieved, but when the class quieted, his shoulders lowered and his back straightened.

“I was going to write my name on the board, but there's no chalk and I forgot to ask for some. I'm used to whiteboards and audience halls, not classrooms, and the reason for this is that I used to lecture at a profiled university. You probably want to ask me which and why I transferred here, but classes will not be wasted on talking about me, and I doubt you care anyway. We have a lot to catch up on, so I brought you your first book today.”

Everyone groaned but had no more complaints and no more questions they wished to vocalize so much that the pigeons in the tree outside fled, squawking and fluttering.

Was that so hard? Take the control. I gave a curt, discreet nod toward Mr. Ross, in hope of receiving some gratitude, but he looked at the back wall, not at me. I knew nothing about college, but if one lectured several hundred students about a subject, it seemed important to have a form of contact with at least one of them.

“I brought a favorite of mine, which is a newer piece of literature compared to many of those used in conventional English classes. I bet a few of you know it, it's by B.E. Ellis and called _American Psycho_.”

We remained obediently still, but most of us perked up at the mention of the title. From the corners of my eyes, I saw most of the front row do, anyway. Finally, salvation! Something written after The Year of The Lord 1960!

Mr. Ross lifted the pile of books on his desk before he began distributing them between the twenty four tables in the classroom. His sweaty fingerprints blemished most of my copy.

“At first I only want you to read it, but once you have done so, you have to do a discourse analysis on it. I want you to focus on the main character and his lifestyle, both work and his... hobby. You'll be handing in an essay on the book next Friday. I won't give you any further instructions. I'm certain Mr. Sharp has taught you how to do a basic book analysis. Class dismissed.” 

Even though we had at least thirty minutes left, he turned around to stuff the remaining five books in his bag: an old leather briefcase which had room for no more than three. As he stood there and jam-packed, the students left, once again quite like sheep tumbling from their paddock. Only me and Spencer loitered at the teacher's bulky desk, where Mr. Sharp's glasses and notebooks still lay like he would come pick them up after the next class.

Spencer asked if Mr. Ross needed help, and the latter gave up on closing his bag.

“No thanks,” he said and left the room. Didn't his shoulders look drawn up? I was pretty sure his hands balled into fists as he passed the geography premises. If the man hadn't been an adult, you could almost fool yourself that he was holding back tears. But come on, our class was bad, but it wasn't _that_ bad.

Spencer turned toward me. “Come on, lunch begins in two minutes.”

Mr. Ross was nowhere to be seen, but none of us cared about the absence of a teacher during lunch. I sat at my usual table where my usual friends shoveled in their usual grilled cheese after grilled cheese and chatted about the usual football game. Their teeth ground down on stir fry; their mouths were wide agape to reveal poorly chewed carrot and wholegrain noodles, and they talked to me in between chowing down on all that rosemary sausage panini and soggy taco shells, so occasionally I replied with a hum or a “score, bro”, and then it didn't matter that I forgot to listen.

Our table consisted of me and Spencer and Pete and Gabe and Joe and William and whoever wanted to sit there as long as they were seniors and didn't spend their time in their room reading comics or something equally nerdy. We sat there talking about football, as if that wasn't twice as bad. “This player beat that player,” and “my favorite team won,” what the hell did it matter? People won football games all the time. There were more important things in life.

Such as Mr. Sharp, who rotted away in his coffin and the police station in town. I expected an officer to barge through the door at any moment, and each time the doors opened and let in a flood of freshmen fresh from gym class, my eardrums nearly burst from the pressure in my head; my life was over; only imprisonment and handcuffs and no more freedom ever awaited behind those doors.

My friends sounded far away, as if I heard them through a wall. Someone at the table next to ours jammed out to the radio through his earphones, some old station playing hits from the eighties, and I found myself humming along to the song while I finished my spring vegetable pasta or whatever the sloppy green and yellow on my plate was called this time. It all tasted like cream anyway.

A voice called “are you there?”

“Sorry, what?”

“I'm headed to the town this afternoon, so if you could give me the, you know?” Spencer's plate was empty and so was the dining hall. He crooked his head to the right and looked at me weirdly, as if I was a mutation of an otherwise ordinary specie. Or one of those pickled eggs they sold in the Asian part of the local supermarket.

“Sure.” I stood up too fast and dizzied, pushing away the pasta. I placed my plate on the rack with stacked trays to the right of the never-empty salad station. Grapes and sliced bell pepper lay on the white cloth like corpses from a war, the ketchup was blood stains and there was never anything new about it. The cutlery had been silver when I started my junior year, but the kitchen personnel had now exchanged it for ordinary stainless steel, the kind you'd find in ordinary middle-class homes. One day the tableware would probably be disposable paper and plastic, and the parents would crinkle their noses at this mediocrity. Slowly the students would disappear and the school would go bankrupt. All I knew was that I had to leave before then.

.

### 

.

The days passed, like days tend to do, except I spent more time plotting and less time with the others during activities. I canceled on volley ball twice, and bought myself a yellow legal pad so I could take notes for my plan. I thought about Levi Daniels' face and the girl who got thrown out of Kara's university for sleeping with a teacher. She now worked at Burger King, had two kids and lived in an ATV, but at least she was happy, right? That could be me in a few weeks, if only I planned carefully enough.

I had just put away the pad and was in my bed, reading year-old news about pop music, when someone knocked on the door. Without bothering to wait for permission – not that he would have received it – Mr. Ross stepped inside. The heel of his shoe broke Spencer's copy of _Dude Ranch_ in five pieces. I pretended not to notice his entry whatsoever. Logic said that for the plan to work I would have to behave more affectionately toward my teacher, but it was excruciatingly difficult when said teacher ignored me every minute after class that I tried to be alone with him.

So I sat there with my headphones on, listening to this cool new band I found out about that week, and besides, I was still angry with Spencer and refused to defend his CD. Mr. Ross scooped up the bits and poured them into the already stuffed trash can.

He maneuvered through the room. Like all the others on the school except for Ian's, it was a battlefield of empty packages of fast food, deodorants and dirty laundry. We were supposed to wash our own clothes, which often resulted in no washing at all. Ian, however, was pretty good at it and if I promised him enough chocolate, he could be bribed into doing mine as well.

I didn't look up from the magazine, even though I had read it three times that month already. Mr. Ross stood like an awkward, unwanted statue in the middle of the messy floor. Only his eyes darted around the room for an excuse to talk. Spencer's side was no tidier than mine, but he had his copy of _American Psycho_ opened on his pillow, whereas I had shoved mine under the bed. 

That's when it dawned on me that the damned essay was due the following morning and I hadn't read a single word of the book. I looked around my side of the room. A pair of boxers hung on the bedpost with a print of chalk on them, I wasn't entirely sure how got there. My pile of magazines was spread across the floor with brown soda stains on them and most of my school papers were reduced to small, crumbled-up balls that me and Spencer used to slam-dunk in our trashcan, not that there was any more room in the thing. If I bothered to tidy my room more often, maybe it wouldn't look like a treasure chamber of juvenile pop culture.

“What did you think of the novel?” Ryan asked.

It was better to play deaf, even if the music had stopped playing. “Yes.”

“Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Are you a pineapple?”

Why couldn't he just leave already? And come back some time I was prepared and didn't reek of sweat because I forgot to shower three days in a row? “Yes.”

The book came flying into my chest and knocked my brand new iPod on the floor. When Mr. Ross proceeded to yank out my headphones, I lost whatever kind of game we were playing.

“It's due tomorrow, and I don't want another essay from someone who thinks they know the point of it because they saw the movie; it's lazy and revolting behavior from someone your age.”

I picked up my iPod and glared at him. As if ten days were enough to plow through an entire book. The task was a mountain to climb, and I was stuck in the lake below with gills and fins.

“Oh, really? Then maybe you should have given us more than ten days to read over four hundred pages and write a reflective essay about them. We have other classes, you know.”

“It's just an essay.” Mr. Ross crossed his arms. “And you had twelve days if you made it a habit to work on weekends as well. My students have gotten through much thicker and more difficult books and written reports about them. I expect less from a bunch of high school students. And if any of you thought it was too little time, you should have said so during class and I might have considered prolonging it. Now it's too late.”

“I read the first forty pages,” I said and flipped through the book. I'd stuck a bookmark in after the first twenty. Read none of them. I had no idea what the first line or the first word was. “How much essay can I write about that?”

He sighed. “Everyone else have written most of theirs and you haven't even started on it.”

“And they're all terrible because they've only seen the movie and only had ten days to read the book and write their essa.”

“A movie essay is better than nothing,” he admitted. “They're all going to get Es or Ds but they don't flunk the assignment. I'm going to have to give you an F.”

I said nothing. What difference made another F on my grade board? I already had so many.

“Your grades are terrible. Peter Sharp couldn't have been that bad a teacher for you to receive no higher than Es in English.”

I ignored the statement and toyed with the end of my headphones-cord. “I'll tell Spencer you broke his CD. You might want to get him a new one; it was a present from his girlfriend.”

Spencer had no girlfriend, but whatever I could say to put myself in a position of control was worth something. Anything, really.

“Do you mind if I sit?”

I rolled my eyes at him and his tweed jacket and my headphones loosely bundled in his hands. “Yes. Your seated position infuriates me and makes it impossible to concentrate on this stupid book. If you were standing, I'd definitely be able to finish it and the essay in twelve hours.”

He removed a shabby blue t-shirt with his fingertips before he sank onto the bed. I shifted my legs as close to the wall as possible, away from him. I uncovered the first page and began reading. The setting was some guy in a cab, kind of rude, but the sentences already swam in front of my eyes and soon I would drown in them. Usually I managed at least a few pages, but Mr. Ross's presence unnerved me so much that I kept reading abandon all hope ye who enter here again and again and again.

“Is there a reason for why you haven't started yet?” he said in a strangely softer voice. He sat way too close, invading the private space of my bed. I'd say anything to get him out and be alone with the book, not reading it but possibly bashing it into the wall or my own head, but instead I pressed myself against the wall. My eyes paced down the page so quickly, you could barely call it skimming.

“Fine. I'll delay the due date for you until Sunday evening. Stop by the annex at building G, that's where I live. I'll grade your assignment as the last and give it to you with the others on Monday. But you can't tell your classmates, and don't think you can pull this on me again. If you have troubles with an assignment, tell me. And if you don't hand in anything, I'll give you an F minus.”

“That's not a real grade,” I mumbled. My tense muscles relaxed a little, even though he remained mere inches away from me. It wasn't so bad; he smelled nice.

“I know. But you're not allowed to hit students anymore, so what else can I do?”

To my own bewilderment, I had to stifle an unflattering snorting kind of laughter. Did he really just say that? I bent my head over the book. _Abandon all hope ye who enter here is scrawled in blood red_ , okay, I can read this book. I can. No problem.

The bed creaked when Mr. Ross stood up from it. He smoothed over the blanket and handed me back my headphones. Then he tripped over an empty suitcase, cursed, and opened the door to leave, but before doing so, he turned around and picked up a shard from the trash can. “Tell Spencer I'm sorry, I stepped on his CD. I'll pay for a new one.”

I nodded, but he was gone, so I returned my attention to the book.

.

### 

.

Spencer slammed the door on his way inside, causing me to flinch over the desk where I was typing away on my laptop. The rooms had no internet connection, so at least that motivated me to write in between long bouts of playing solitaire and minesweeper.

“What the hell happened to my album?” he asked.

Without looking up from my computer, I told him the truth. “But don't worry, he said he'll get you a new one.”

“That's right, he better do that, it was a deluxe version. Wait, are you actually doing homework?”

“That essay's due tomorrow so I thought I should finish it before handing it in,” I lied.

“You can do that in ten hours? I thought you hadn't even read the book.”

Spencer had already written his: four pages of characteristics and plot-line summed up without any grammatical errors or misinterpretations. At least it seemed that way when I'd only written half a page myself. With double spacing. I took a bite of my candy bar and said, mouth full of peanuts and fudge, “I watched the movie. Big difference.”

Spencer snorted, grabbed the rest of my chocolate and ate it. “You're gonna fail so hard.”

“Yeah, well, I'm not staying long enough for him to fail me in the class.”

“Not this again.” Spencer groaned and kicked off his shoes. They landed in a pile of dirty laundry, but just like me, Spencer could bribe others into doing it for him. Freshmen would gladly do a pile of sweaty t-shirts for a finished A-graded essay far above their usual standard. When my chocolate stash and monthly allowance from the old ones at home expired, Spencer still had his mind, so he did less laundry than me. The only difference between us was that he actually liked writing essays and I hated renouncing money or candy.

I said “let's not, not tonight. I'm over it,” even though I wasn't and neither was he. But being friends meant we could agree on not fighting over it every day.

“Sure.”

“Did you get the goods?”

Spencer obtained the bags from his nondescript backpack. Walking down the streets of town, he looked like any other student on his way to buy burgers and candy, but it only required one glance into his bag to see that its contents were anything but.

The largest bag, full of lumpy greens, Spencer stashed underneath the bottom of his suitcase. It had a practical layer of cloth that you could close with a zipper and was well-suited for concealing illegal drugs. Two bottles of whisky joined the ones I had stolen from headmaster Daniels' office, as did an indeterminable kind of fruit schnapps. The pink pills and blue ampules fit into the bed post. Spencer rolled up two small bags of white powder and stashed them in the ceiling lamp. An empty bag of chips camouflaged a six-pack of beer. Spencer stacked the remaining alcohol on the shelves of his closet, which was the only thing in the room that had a lock. 

My closet used to have a lock before that one day when Mr. Sharp pissed me off so much, I slammed the door so hard it fell off its hinges. Since then the door had just stood there and covered up the vacuity of the closet. My clothes were all strewn across the floor anyway.

“There's a lot this time, isn't there? Are you sure you can get rid of it all?”

“Of course,” said Spencer. In a few days, he could have sold it all, but such activity attracted attention from the teachers, and so he usually eased the loot out among the students over the course of three weeks.

“Ian's stopping by later. You have yours?”

I nodded and opened the desk drawer. Unlike Spencer's fenced drugs, I had no reason to hide my medicine. Sure, taking it was helpful and all, but Ian was rich and said he was allergic to cocaine. He said Ritalin was the closest he got to the desired effect, which was pretty sad, but as long as I received the money, I disregarded where my pills went. I felt better without them anyway, less lethargic. I wasn't the only one either. At least both the junior Martins of the school sold their pills, but none had the business appeal of Spencer Smith.

When I thought about all the illicit trades performed and organized by my best friend, I pictured a hulking, burly man in the Mafia called DelGiorno or something, whose arms bulged against the fabric of his suit like two hams stocked inside a pair of pantyhose. Definitely not Spencer lounging on his stomach in front of a greasy laptop, scratching his balls through his sweatpants with one arm elbow-deep in a bag of seasoned popcorn.

“Just watch out, 'cause I think Mrotek is suspicious about your behavior,” I advised him.

Spencer snorted again. “Mrotek's always been suspicious since his wife left him. That's why we don't cheat on tests in calculus anymore” He stretched the bag of popcorn toward me, and I scooped up a generous handful.

“Are you done with your essay or do you want to watch a movie with me?”

I browsed the few hundred words on my screen, the ragged copy of _American Psycho_ to my left, and the alluring action on Spencer's computer. “No, I'm done,” I said and slammed the laptop shut. I could always write tomorrow, considering that Mr. Ross had given me plenty of time to finish the essay.

.

### 

.

Sunday caught up with me faster than I cared to admit. Part of the time I re-watched _American Psycho_ and noted disorganized ideas on a piece of paper that perished in the washing machine the following day, some part playing soccer with Travis, Pete and William, even though the latter deserted the game when his face whacked into the dirt and ruined not only his nose but his Dior sweater as well.

He left me to defend my goal of two wooden sticks half-buried in the dirt against Pete and Travis; an undertaking I attempted valiantly, but failed. The horizon swallowed the sun just as Pete kicked the final ball right past my face, and the bystanders shuffled off to the dining hall to consume their gravy-soaked mashed potatoes and roast chicken. I was starving but still needed to write the conclusion for my essay, so I abdicated and prayed no one queued at the printer.

I faked my way through five lines of conclusion, sprinted to the printer room and waited the agonizing seven minutes it took the primitive machine to spit out my essay. In the meantime I discovered a tennis ball under a file cabinet, and began dunking it into the ground, one, two, hundred and seventy four times before the ball rolled under a cabinet again. The clock stroke eight twenty; my essay was all printed out, and I'd promised Mr. Ross that I would stop by at eight, but I still hadn't eaten dinner.

I grabbed the papers without bothering to put them in a binder and hurried to the dining hall. It was empty except for a woman who cleared the stations. Her name was Molly or something, and she'd spent half a lifetime catering to the students before us.

“There was food thirty minutes ago, you're late.”

Come on, it wasn't like there was nothing left. I did my best to seem smaller, blinking slowly at the floor and looking abashed. “Aw, can't you spare an extra plate or something? It all goes into the trash anyway.”

Her eyes softened and she looked over her shoulder at the wagon of slimy, steamed brussels sprouts and lonely potatoes. She opened her mouth, but a rhythmic clacking noise interrupted whatever she was about to say, and headmaster Daniels came up behind us. The fucker.

“Late for supper again, Urie?” Then he turned to Molly or Millie or whatever her name was, and said “he believes himself above our food, don't you think? Well, Myla, if it's any consolation, I think your cooking is magnificent.”

Myla gave an uneasy smile, and under the piercing gaze of the headmaster, she shook her head at me, saying “sorry, no, you can't have any.” But in her hand was a slice of dry chicken, which she handed to me behind his back. 

Daniels studied the ceiling as he marched his usual round in the hall in a way he probably thought of as stoic. He looked more like a turkey on Ritalin, and I would know this, because when I was eight, my sister Kara once tried to catch one for Thanksgiving after I had fed it my medicine in secret. 

Our family had eaten frozen pizza for dinner that year, but whenever I brought up the incident at family gatherings, my parents shushed me as if they were ashamed of the Ritalin turkey.

When I was twelve and thought back on their reaction, I concluded they were ashamed of me. When I turned sixteen, I didn't really care.

“Thanks,” I mouthed and skipped out the door, headed toward the annex where Mr. Ross had mentioned that he resided.

.

### 

.

Saint Franklin's Boarding School For Adolescent Boys was such a long title, it barely fit on the informational folder about the school, and the campus fit this coincidence well. Above the dusty hills towered high polished walls the color of a vintage champagne from which the fizz had long died down. It looked exactly as if a hurricane had ravished the landscape and spewed a Barbie castle onto the ground. The buildings had survived for short of two centuries, and they still sparkled as if a giant janitor woke up everyday and polished the walls with windex or something. Whatever janitors used for that kind of thing I wouldn't know, because I'd never cleaned a window or a house in my entire life, and why would I? My family always occupied a maid until my mom fired her for screwing my dad and hired a new one. It's a wonder she never fired my dad instead.

Patches of grass appeared between the pillars and a gym hall the size of two slaughterhouses that held separate fitness room and stippled lines for whichever exercise our energetic teacher, Mr. Garnett, might drag us through.

Mr. Garnett, like most of the other teachers and personnel, lived in the town below the school. The only exception were those who came from out of state: they lived at the school until they found an apartment or house in which they could settle. Mr. Hall, the chemistry teacher, lived in an annex to building B next to his beloved bases and Erlenmeyer flasks. And then Mr. Ross had moved into the previously uninhabited Annex G.

I busied myself with concocting excuses for visiting a teacher this late, but kept to the shadow of the bell tower in any case, stumbling over rubble and branches that had not been swiped away by one of the gardeners who cleared this place thrice a year. No one bothered to visit the tower after the old chapel of the school burned down in '74. Since then not a single religious soul had bothered to gather the necessary funds to re-build it. I was determined to find out who committed the crime, because if they still lived, I wanted to send them a check and a thank-you card. I hadn't ridden myself of my mom's Saturday church lunches just to be sent off to some sect.

I supressed the thought of my parents only to have sudden contractions in my stomach replace the unpleasant memories. I had no idea what Mr. Ross expected of my essay. I had probably spent too little time on the conclusion, and the opening paragraph was poorly thought-through, just like everything else that came out of my mouth. The urgency of the football game of the afternoon seemed childish, and I clutched the papers a little tighter. The closer I got to the annex, the slower I walked, and once outside the door, I almost turned back to my room. The only thing stopping me was that I had told Spencer I would take a long shower. Spencer would probably use his alone time to jerk off, and I had no desire whatsoever to walk in on that.

Besides, now that I had spent so much time writing the damned essay, not handing it at all would be a complete waste, so I knocked on the door.

“Come in,” he yelled. Shortly after, I heard a low “unless you're Levi Daniels,” and chuckled. Mr. Ross wasn't that bad after all, and it wasn't like my paper would receive anything higher than a D anyway. But if my worries were not about the response to my paper, I lacked an explanation for the tightness in my stomach. This ache only otherwise occurred in the summer right before we hurdled our warm bodies into the lake from one of the highest cliffs, and it had no presence in winter.

A light flickered in the small room, but the curtains blocked my view. The small housing intimidated me for some reason; I forgot all the manners people said I didn't have, causing me to barge through the door. It accidentally slammed into the wall so hard that a picture of the school in 1966 crashed to the floor.

The annex consisted of a combined living room and kitchen. Mr. Ross sat at a table between the two, reading the pile of papers next to a pint of red velvet ice cream. To his left, clothes and books balanced in wobbly towers on an avocado-colored couch. Behind that was the kitchen, and when I say kitchen, it was only half a fridge, two hotplates and a sink sandwiched between two cupboards. 

He had deposited books on top of these cupboards as well; they threatened to weigh down the whole arrangement and tear the cupboards right off the wall. I could have sworn the bottom line of the middle one curved slightly downward. Hopefully they contained porcelain less fancy than the stuff in headmaster Daniels' office.

Two suitcases lay on the floor with their zipper mouths agape and more clothes spilling out of them. Despite the sixty one degrees outside, Mr. Ross wore a loose-fitted tank top and had turned the ceiling fan at full blast. A gilded rosary swung from it, clacking against the blades with each rotation, so maybe he was catholic or maybe it was just stuck there. My plan would work a lot smoother if he wasn't a man of faith.

“Are you going to read your essay out loud or did you not write it at all? And close the door, please.”

I obliged and to be polite I also hung the picture back up on the wall. Cracks spread all over and obscured the sepia faces of three dozens then students, which I was pretty sure wasn't my fault because I hadn't heard it shatter.

For good measure or good luck, I smoothed over my papers in the desperate hope it might improve my grade. The one atop the pile of already graded ones was Spencer's: his prime Of Course I'll Get An A essay, but the letter on the bottom of it was a C plus and, scribbled in the same red pen as Mr. Ross held in his hand, was worded: _Incoherent, some grammatical mistakes, but overall decent analysis of the values of the book._

He caught me looking, scraped up a spoonful of ice cream and commented “and that's even the best assignment of the night. If you worry yours will be the worst, you clearly don't know your classmates. And judging from their idiocy, why would you want to?”

I opened and closed my mouth, dumbfounded. I should argue their case; after all most of them were my friends. Some of them. I talked to these guys during lunch and after class because we were all stuck at the same boarding school every day and every night except for home-weekends, but if that wasn't the definition of friendship, who knew what was.

It wasn't worth the risk of angering my teacher, when I didn't know exactly where I had him. No, it was better to assess for a few days more, then decide how far I could stretch what others designated my 'bad manners'.

“In all fairness you only gave us ten days to complete the assignment. That's not a lot. I mean, we have other classes.”

“Any assignments in those?”

I deliberated a few lies, which would all fall apart if he double-checked with the other teachers. Oh, and he so would; he was exactly the type to pull off such a stunt. “No,” I admitted, “but –”

Mr. Ross capped his pen and straightened in the chair. The avantgarde designer lamp obscured whatever it was that he squinted at. I caught a glimpse of a red mark under his hairline, probably from hitting his head too often on the lamp. His eyes had a fatigued glaze from grading papers all evening. I felt kind of sorry for him; all his hard work was so fruitless because none of my classmates cared all that much about receiving their homework this quickly.

Senior year demolished enough of us on its own with all the college applications and tests. The others said that writing the assignments was bad enough on its own, spending days worrying about the grade or when they received their homework only piggy-backed the worries on their Prada-clad backs. I mostly nodded when they yapped on and on about their further education as if they were the only person alive to experience the hardships of it. College was overrated anyway.

Mr. Ross pushed hair out of his face to reveal a crescent-shaped scar from the ceiling lamp. “You had twelve whole days and an entire school full of teachers who can help you. You're not expected to write a thesis or even something at college freshman level, so you have nothing to complain about. See, the thing about your class is that you all still think it's about handing in what the teacher wants. Like I read your shitty essays for my own pleasure. I do this to help you prepare for college where you're supposed to think like individuals, and in return I get twenty three copies of nearly the same assignment.

I say read the book, so you read the book, but you read it because you think I want you to read it, not because it's a guideline for you to produce a good essay. Has anyone done a comparative analysis? No, even though the ideal strategy for this task would have been to compare the industrial materialism of the late eighties with that of today, the pressure of the economy compared to – I'm ranting, sorry, but you've almost graduated high school, so how how come no one thought about making the essay relevant to the actual world we live in? Why is that? Right, that's because you're all a bunch of snooty brats sheltered from reality at your precious fucking boarding school –”

We both startled at the loud snap of his pen. Mr. Ross twitched so violently that he knocked over the melted ice cream. Rapidly it pooled across the table, stormed at the pile of essays like some biblical flood, and only seconds before impending disaster I swept the papers off the table and onto the floor.

“God, look at this mess – thank you – I'm gonna have to –” He began wiping the liquid goo off the table with his arm, before he hurried after a towel from what I presumed was the bathroom. 

Maybe I should have just left. At that point I had delivered my essay, after all. But I had a plan to complete, so I stayed and dipped my finger in the mixture of ice cream and bleeding ink from the jarred edge of the pen.

This one time I went with Kara for an ice cream cone right after she'd had her nails done, and I held her hair while she threw it up, scratching her throat bloody with her acrylic nails covered in rhinestones, and I swear it was the same color bloody ice cream that covered Mr. Ross' table. I kept my mouth shut about that when he reemerged with a towel. His bony hands scrubbed at the table so forcefully you'd think he tried to eradicate the whole thing, but the icky fluid had already soaked into the wood and soon he quit. He shot me a sheepish look and cleaned his now pink hands on the equally pink towel.

The proverb said not to cry over spilled milk, but they were both dairy and he looked so distressed, I had to say something, so I said “at least you don't get people for dinner here.”  
He looked like he was about to laugh, but didn't know how to. Instead he flung the towel at his couch and resumed his huddled position at the table. “You're right, I don't. Unless you count headmaster Daniels, but he never leaves his office and bourbon to mingle with us peasant teachers.”

“That's not actually true; he left today to talk to Myla”

“Who?”

“One of the cooks. Do you even leave? I've never seen you at meals.” I picked up the essays from the floor and handed them to him. A few drops of ink had splotched onto Spencer's C plus essay. “Why do you live here? I'm sure there are nicer apartments in town.”

He noticed the stains too, and sighed. “It's cheaper. And I don't have a car, so, go figure.”

“Yeah, I noticed you ran all the way to the funeral. I'm guessing you don't have a physical fitness either.”

For once I chatted – or teased if you prefer that word – instead of exasperating a teacher. It was plesant, a relief even, and I was about to swat him on the arm, not hard, just for fun, before I remembered that he might consider that inappropriate. Then again he looked nothing like a teacher. Teachers didn't roll up their sleeves or unbutton their shirts or show off their arms in sweaty tank tops. They didn't have pints of ice cream on their tables or look at me like they didn't know if I was kidding or not before they broke into nervous smiles.

“I sold it on eBay for a collector's edition of The White Album,” he said, still smiling.

“Was it worth it?”

“No, only Ringo had signed it. The seller ran to Mexico with my fitness and never responded to my emails.”

“The bastard.” I laughed, too loud to hear if he did too. The sound overshadowed the cooing from the grandfather clock behind me, but the bird reminded me about my shower-excuse. 

“Can I use your sink?”

He nodded and allowed my passage to the kitchen-part of the room, where I turned on the tap and let the water drench my scalp and hair completely. I picked up the towel from the floor, but the ice cream glued it to my fingers, so I opted for shaking the water out of my hair like a dog instead.

“Doesn't the school have showers?”

“What, you've been here a week without taking one?”

He shook his head and pointed to the second door, the room where he'd gotten the towel. “I have one of my own,” he said.

“Looks like you never have to leave this place outside of class, huh?” Maybe he never did, maybe that was why I'd never observed him stroll through the courtyard or chew french toast with the rest of us in the morning. He shrugged and fanned the papers across the table, then produced a pencil from the jar in front of him. The bird cooed again, alerting me that I should leave. But before I opened the door, Mr. Ross cleared his throat.

“If I'm supposed to be your, uh, tutor, then I guess we can go by a first-name basis. I don't know what you called Sharp when he was alive, but if you'd be more comfortable using first names, that's cool. If you want. I'm Ryan.”

Well, that was surprisingly easy. “But you're still Mr. Ross in the classroom?”

“And on the paper. I'm not grading anyone differently in class because I'm their tutor.”

Relieved, I nodded. The extra two days Mr. Ross – Ryan – had given me worked wonders for my essay, in the aspect that I actually wrote it. I still aimed for a D, though. D plus at best.

“Now go back to your room and sleep. I still need to read four more papers on Bateman/Batman parallels and how 'fucking stoked' people are for Christian Bale as Bruce Wayne.”

He walked me to the door where he took the old framed photograph and flipped it around so the shattered glass faced the wall. After that there was nothing more to say. I shut the door behind me but lingered outside for a while, watching his shadow through the curtains. I thought about the neckline of his tank top and the paisley shirt scrunched up in one of the suitcases, measuring each component against the eventual outcome of my plan.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't worry, I made a lot of _he wants the D_ jokes, too. Out loud. See you next monday (~:


	3. Chapter 3

The class was a poultry run the following morning. Someone in the back row propelled erasers across the room, and Gabe had started a production of paper planes, which he projected at whoever dared peep at him. Sure, he laughed while he did it, but a few weeks before he admitted to me that the planes were his way of coping with IADA (Impending Assignment Delivery Anxiety). Everyone else pretended they had important assignments or folders to dig from the depths of their school bags, when really all they kept in there was power bars and the Playboy issue of last month.

Spencer had his earphones plugged in even though class had not yet started. A wave of guilt washed over me when I saw him, but just as soon it retreated back into the surrounding sea of fart jokes and the stuffy smell of books, chalk and twelve different kinds of deodorant. I could do as little about Spencer's grade as I could stop the blood rushing to my head when Ryan entered the classroom.

Ryan – man, I had to address him as Mr. Ross, I needed to remember that – strolled into the room at ten o'clock. Any of the worry that adhered to him like the dumb little post-its on his non-fiction was gone along with the tie he wore last lesson. At least he'd ironed the paisley shirt, but he hadn't bothered to button the last three buttons. My blatant ogling earned me a glare of disapproval, so I turned one eighty on my chair to ask Travis for a pencil.

“Sorry, I don't have any,” he said. “You gotta bring your own stuff to class, dude.”

Ryan placed his horribly outdated leather briefcase on the table and pulled the essays from its innards. Some of the pages clung at each other with the ice cream-glue of last night, and it was funny, I don't know why, but I couldn't stop the giggles that bubbled up in my throat, and I choked on the hilarity even though it wasn't funny at all, especially not when Ryan's hand slammed my graded papers down in front of me.

“Laughing about your essay, Urie? I certainly did when I read it.”

My laughter died down and I scooped the pages into my lap, where the grade was shielded from the curious eyes of my neighbors. Not even Mr. Sharp had outright mocked a student in class, and now the entirety of it joined in curiosity about my commented grade.

 _Your observation of Bateman's diary-esque way of telling was well spotted, but judging from the rest of what you wrote, it was not so much your observational skills that revealed this rather than a frantic attempt at shoving in as much useless information as possible to fill the word quota. Your essay was sadly tacky and completely missed the point of both the assignment and the master-piece that is American Psycho. PS: learn the difference between your and you're, for God's sake, you're a senior in high school._

Circled below that passage was a small E minus.

I tried to swallow the lump in my throat, but like the laughter a minute before, it was stuck. Had I seriously expected more than this? Some idiotic part of me had fooled the rest of my brain into thinking, not that my essay was a literary masterpiece, but that Ryan at least would restrict some of the spite in his comment. I traced my finger over the lines of the E. It might as well have been written with wasp venom, it stung that much.

A glance around the room informed me that the rest of them were disappointed too, but none of them looked the way I felt; like Ryan had punched me in the neck. When the pair of searching eyes overwhelmed me too much, I sat up straighter in the chair and shook the defeat from my shoulders. I could not allow a single bad essay to spoil my entire plan of escape.

But for the rest of the class Ryan hardly looked at me. Always at the wall behind me or at Joe next to me or even at the dirt on the floor in front of my feet. He discoursed the key points of the novel on the blackboard and enlightened the class about our low standard as casually as if he described the density of chalk in his hand. From his rant last night, I figured he wanted to hurl that piece of chalk into someone's eye rather than politely explain how to construct an analytical essay.

The guys around me picked up their pens to scribble down Ryan's exact words and the illegible notes on the blackboard. Pens clacked, paper ripped and shredded; hands chopped over sentences and advice; heads bobbed up and down to scrutinize the blackboard. It all went so fast, it reminded me of speeding down the highway with Kara in the Lexus Dad bought for her sixteenth birthday.

Ryan's voice interrupted me: “Do you think you can memorize all of this on your own?” He spoke to the dust that floated in the air and the incessant wasp that buzzed around the ceiling lamp, but he directed the words at me.

“I forgot to bring my pencil,” I muttered.

He singled out a pen from the tin can on the desk. It sliced through the air before it marred my cheek with a blue ink scar. “I suggest you write down the advice I give you. You're going to need it more than anyone in this class.”

Someone behind me whispered “wow, harsh much?” but soon recommenced their writing. Ryan's notes crisscrossed the blackboard in a roadmap of letters, and I followed their paths with my eyes instead of writing them down on the piece of paper I didn't have. When the bell rung, Ryan wiped a quart of the information away with one graceful swipe of his hand, and it was all irrelevant. I looked at my hand and the sad little 'your = possessive, you're = you + are' that I had tattooed on the spot between my index finger and thumb. We had P.E. after lunch and the concomitant sweat would wipe off the advice, so it didn't matter; it never did.

Spencer beckoned from the door, but I shook my head and gestured at the paisley-patterned back of our teacher. Twenty two boys rallied past him and out of the classroom, ready to take on the lunch in the dining hall. Eventually he followed and I loitered for an opportunity to tap Ryan on the shoulder and engage in some fierce sweet-talk and convincing.

“Do you want to talk about how unfair of me it was to give you that E?” Ryan placed the sponge on the chalk tray and wiped his hands on his shirt.

I bit my lip, uncertain and hyper-aware of his crossed arms and stern expression. “I don't know, I guess E minus was kind of harsh.”

“It was the grade your assignment deserved.” Ryan looked anywhere but at me. He organized things on the desk and devoted an extraordinary amount of time to buckling the latch on his briefcase. “If you want to change my mind about your writing skills, there's another essay for you on Thursday. You'll have ten days to write it.”

My heart dropped. It was biologically impossible, but I swore I felt it hit my intestines and bounce all the way back into my throat where it lodged itself in the form of despair.

Ryan finally looked at me, not the floor or the pen he borrowed me, and the strange mixture of concern and condemnation gave me the same creeps as the staring right when I received my essay. Then his stare evolved into invasion, as if he deciphered all my doubts and insecurities about this essay and every other essay I would ever have to write.

“It's about classism. I expect you to write at least three and a half page. Don't tell the others.”

He obviously thought this alleviated my despair, but the confusion-tumor only expanded even further while I tried to maintain eye contact and look grateful at the same time. “Are you all right?” he asked.

Seducing your teacher on the verge of an emotional breakdown over homework was proving difficult.

Ryan's hand had barely grazed my shoulder when Mr. Carden emerged and Ryan yanked it off with the facial expression of a kid caught stealing candy from the pick and mix section of a supermarket. Mr. Carden was his usual smiling self.

“Need the room for a presentation, do you mind?”

“I was just discussing a grade with this student,” said Ryan. He sounded so formal, it bordered on disturbing. Mr. Carden noticed, too; he looked at me and burst out in his usual hearty laughter. More than anything it resembled the bark of a pneumonia-struck dog, but he was alright. I'd almost go as far as to say that I preferred him above any of the other teachers, had it not been for the fact that his subject was history and I dozed off during half of his classes. Carden talked with the abbreviations his students used. It clashed with his profession of studying ancient Greece and the civil war, but until Ryan's arrival, he was the youngest teacher this school had employed in more than a decade.

“Yes, I bet you were. Good luck,” he said, followed by a wink like the two of them shared a secret.

If Carden's wink confused me, Ryan's reaction perplexed me even more. His face went paler than his chalk-dusted hands, which clutched his briefcase so tightly that the tendons stood out like mountain ridges. The muscles in his jaw tensed and rippled before he forced a terse smile and departed the classroom with his shoulders drawn up and long legs almost tripping over themselves to get out of there.

Strange.

I popped past a crowd of confused freshmen and into the dining hall, grabbed a tray and slid onto a chair next to Pete. “What are we having?” I asked.

“Mashed potatoes,” he replied and let a slew of pale yellow splash onto my plate along with a few peas. “Apparently made without the potatoes.”

The other guys were already up for seconds and rounds from the dessert bar, which was unmanned because everyone made a mess no matter how much kitchen personnel was there to observe and report. There was vanilla soft serve everywhere and smarties trailed from their container to our table and Sisky's pockets like a sugar rush parody of _Hansel and Gretel._

I couldn't eat anything, so I asked “am I the only one who thinks the new teacher is weird?”

“He dresses weird,” Sisky churned out through a mouth full of macadamia cookies with chocolate chips in them.

“But the book was pretty good,” said Spencer, who shoveled in slow cooked beef loin on freshly baked rosemary focaccia drizzled with extra virgin olive oil at three hundred bucks per gallon. Everything was fucking freshly baked, but the kitchen staff threw half of it out at the end of the day or ate it themselves because they didn't need food as pretentious as us who paid for it.

Gabe laughed at him, “What, you actually read the thing? Nerd.”

“Hey, when we get to college, we can't just copy-paste from the internet. The professors take that stuff seriously; it can get you thrown out.”

“Please, they just say that to scare you off doing it. My brother's been plagiarizing for years.”

“Yeah, and he failed last semester.”

“Irrelevant. What do you think they do in college, Brendon?”

“Huh?” I said and tilted back my chair. “What college?”

Finally William opened his mouth and said “do you think they're as strict as everyone says?”

I shrugged and stuffed one of Spencer's olives in my mouth. College, college, college, couldn't they for one second shut up about the damn thing? “I don't care all that much about college to be honest; whatever happens happens, man.”

“Where did you apply?” Pete asked, not just to me but the whole table, and I stuffed three more olives in my mouth, swirling around the stones so I didn't have to join the conversation.

“Stanford, UCLA, I don't care where as long as it's in Cali, baby.”

Spencer, snorting: “California, really? Everyone knows the best colleges are on the east coast. Except for Stanford, but they're super strict, so to be sure, I sent applications out to Dartmouth, Princeton and Cornell as well. I have a great feeling about Princeton, I'm just hoping I can make it to Philly in time for the admissions.”

Gabe pointed his fork at Spencer with a solemn expression. “But everyone knows the chicks are wilder on the west coast.”  
He whirled himself into a monologue about the scientific proof that the miles from Japan to California indirectly determined how freaky a girl was in the bedroom, and I think most of us stopped listening to him, maybe except for Pete. 

.

### 

.

Every two months, on some random date, the sophomores of the school hosted a quiz night, but I had to write an essay, so I skipped it. Not that it would have been much fun anyway, I mean, come on, sophomores? Being in charge of something? Some of the kids couldn't even drive.

Just as I was about to begin my schoolwork, my phone rang, and though I welcomed most disturbances, this was one I could easily spare. The caller ID on my phone showed my home phone number. I closed my laptop and searched my pockets for a cigarette, anything to soothe my nerves. In the end I only found a piece of gum.

I hadn't talked to her since Christmas, when I thought it would be the last time. I wasn't even sure she knew about Mr. Sharp. Her voice was the same as when she always talked to me: slightly tense and on the cusp of breaking, raw and powdered from her nerve medication.

“Hello, Brendon.”

“What do you want?”

She never called unless she had bad news. The first week after I arrived at this hellhole it was the death of Werner, our old schnauzer with the name and behavior of a nazi veteran. Two months later uncle Melvin suffered a stroke. But not actually bad news, not the devastating, turn-your-world-upside-down news, no, those she spared and kept to herself because imagine the consequences if people found out! I shook the thought of the month from Thanksgiving to Christmas out of my head and listened to her excuses. “As you know, we had planned to go to Florida to visit your grandparents this spring break. It's been so long; your grandmother misses you.”

Ah yes, the Florida (guilt) trip. It sprouted from my mom's desire to fool my grandma into letting my mom inherit her pearls and diamonds instead of my aunt. This would be the last attempt before illness hurled Mrs. Urie Sr. into the grave along with her husband, who wasn't my real granddad, but my grandma slept around a lot. My mom never approved, but she wanted her mom's pearls so badly that she shut up about it.

“So?” I stretched and twirled the glob of slimy strawberry bubblegum around my index finger.

“And you would go with us, obviously.”

I had given the excursion little thought until now that I remembered I would have to go; it was another thing I could have avoided if me and Spencer had succeeded back then, but alas. Instead of chilling with Jon by a pool in California, I was forced to visit Florida and eat raisin cookies.

My mom continued, in that special tone of voice she only used to appease obstinate voters when their beliefs ran counter to the values of my dad: “But unfortunately we can't have you come home right now. Your father has a very important meeting with Governor Wilde from Utah, that he simply can't prolong.”

“So go without him.” I tacked the gum next to the dozen other pieces on my headboard.

“You know I can't, sweetheart.”

Sweetheart. I bet she never used that one with The Millers when she politely declined their barbecue arrangements.

“I have to join your father at this dinner; it's necessary for convincing Wilde to arrange another meeting with the minister of defense. Politics, dear, it's so complicated.” She let out a supposedly charming laughter, one I'd seen her perfect over the years in front of the mirror so it both sounded and looked natural, yet without revealing any excess skin around her neck or tilting her head back enough so her horse teeth and uvula showed. Oh yeah, I knew all the tricks about physical and subconscious manipulation, yet instead of running for senate and eventually president, I wasted them on getting into the pants of my English teacher.

“Okay,” I said.

“We'll see you in April, honey, for your birthday!”

Were all the nicknames supposed to fool me that she loved me more? I didn't know. Before I had the chance to ask about Kara, about if it was safe to leave her alone at college during Spring Break, my mother hung up the phone.

.

### 

.

A few days later, I frequented Annex G. With me I carried my notepad and two sharpened pencils I had stolen from Spencer's desk drawer. I wasn't entirely sure why I came to visit unannounced or which excuse I would use, but by the time I passed the old bell tower, it was too late to turn around. Ryan had already seen me. He huffed and puffed up the hill a few yards away from me with two full bags of groceries in each hand. When he discovered me in the middle of his path, he stopped.

He adhered to that annoying habit of not looking at me, so when he muttered a “what are you doing here?”, it was to the ground.

Homework, taking a walk, something useful, on my way to get you alone and talk about the possibility of someone catching me giving you a blowjob and throwing me out of the school so I don't have to fail the semester. I settled for a neutral middle ground.  
“Actually, I wanted to see you.”

“Me? What for?” He hitched up the grocery bags and his eyes darted around campus. Another teacher raised his hand for a wave, and Ryan rolled his shoulder awkwardly in return. “Can't it wait until class tomorrow?”

Could it wait until tomorrow for me to lean a few inches too close when he spoke? What about the non-uniform low rise jeans I'd gotten up at four in the morning to wash, could that wait even an hour longer? I blinked at the ground, at my worn-out sneakers and his much nicer but equally dusty dress shoes. Tried to seem shy, ashamed even, and maybe he would believe me. “Well, I guess, it's just... Everyone else knows exactly what to do with the assignment and...”

Ryan finished my sentence for me: “you don't want to look stupid in front of them. Okay, I get it. Come on then.”

As if I cared that much about looking stupid in front of my classmates.

“You want help with that?” I asked sweetly, pointing to the grocery bags and their straining plastic handles. Ryan shook his head and hitched up the bags once again. He waddled off like he didn't want to be seen with me hurrying after him, but the groceries weighed him down, so his pace kind of resembled that of a pregnant goose.

The second time in my life I stepped into the annex, it was much cleaner. He had stacked some of the books onto shelves and the rest were gone, packed into a closed-off bedroom. A threadbare red carpet had replaced the suitcases and a cheap ironing board leaned on the wall next to the backward picture.

“You iron your own clothes?”

“It's cheaper than paying someone else to do it.”

But that's the maid's job, I almost said. I bit my tongue instead. “Hey, it's cool, I wasn't doubting your masculinity or whatever.”

Ryan shot me an odd look.

“No,” he said before he opened the small fridge and stocked its shelves. I laid my notepad on the table and aided him in unpacking the bags. Most of the food was pre-cooked dinners for one person along with a few vegetables and eight tubs of ice cream.

At the round dinner table, we studied all the important books and sheets of paper as if they were actual entertainment. Ryan seemed to stock non-fiction on twenty different subjects like a damned library, and when I pointed out the existence of the school library, he actually said “but I want to own these books myself.” 

Had he nothing better to spend his hard-earned money on than schoolbooks? Before I could question him about it, he immediately veered onto the lane of sources and articles and consistency, pointing to a line in one book, then frantically flipping through the next. I forgot it all the instance it went in one ear, but instead of going out the other, it kind of just stayed and seeped cowardly back out the ear it came from.

“So, as you can see this is also relevant to American Psycho.”

I nodded absently. My t-shirt began to crawl up my back, chafing my skin in the way small t-shirts did, but my tight clothes seemed ridiculous when he hardly even looked at me.

Ryan sighed gloomily and slammed the book shut. “You still don't get it, do you?”

Rattled out of my pondering of seduction techniques, I nodded far too eagerly. “No, no, I get it. Totally.”

“I can't help you with this if I don't make sense to you. And then what's the point of you being here?”

Ouch, that stung. “Are you that eager to get rid of me?”

He squirmed in his chair and glanced at the clock. “You have friends to be with. Balls to kick on the lawn and movies to watch.”

His obvious ambivalence toward my presence could mean either of two things. One: that events followed my plan like the yellow strips on a highway, and he was having an internal debate about morals that very moment, or two: I annoyed the hell out of him by asking questions about subjects I'd never understand.

He stretched in his chair and dangled his head off its edge. His hair was longer like that, when gravity stretched out the curls. It's a test, I reminded myself as I leaned onto the table, laying my head on it and felt the shirt ride farther up my back. With one eye peering from above my biceps, near shrouded by my hair, I noticed how his eyes stalked the hem of my shirt, or at least I thought I did.

The fact that maybe, probably, most likely, it was option number one spurred me on so much, I bolted out of my lazy position and re-opened the book. “Okay, let's do this.”

He cracked his knuckles and stretched his slender body in the kitchen chair. Being the obvious bonehead I was, I gawked a little too much at the inclines of his ribcage. He planted his elbow very close to mine and reached past me for another sheet of paper. He smelled like old books, but it could just as well have been the ones around us because the entire room reeked of library. It choked me, but at the same time calmed me in a home-y sort of way, you know, if you came from a house with a well-stocked library and parents who read you fairy tales from dusty books. 

The book in Ryan's hands was entitled _203 Tips on Essays for Students and Teachers._

“This has saved many a dumb student's ass on the topic of writing essays, not that you're dumb; that's not what I'm saying.”

“Hey, I know I'm not super brainy. Why do you think I'm here instead of playing soccer with my friends?”

“No, I'm sorry. Really. The headmaster told me about your, um, diagnosis. Is that why you have trouble finishing your essays?”

Great, he wanted to talk about this now? I felt his eyes on my neck, my lips and my face but they were patient, not exploring or enticed. This wasn't supposed to happen. We were supposed to flirt over the topic of essays; I was supposed to win him over with my body language. I said, “no” with a mouth arid as the landscape around the school.

“I understand if you need some extra help, I can grant you that to some extent.”

_No, that's not why, you don't understand._

My thoughts began to diverge from their lanes, not an uncommon occurrence but the bad ones swerved toward the rest like a ghostdriver of negativity. I didn't want them there. We were studying. Essays. I fixated on the clock in front of me, trying to block my ears from the old, clover-soft evergreen that came from his mouth two seconds later, 

“you have nothing to be ashamed of, it's not that uncommon” 

like I suffered from fucking erectile dysfunction or something.

 _just shut up, just shut up, don't hit him, he's just trying to help no he's not yes because he feels sorry for you, you're pathetic, shut up shut up,_ I bit my lip but it came out anyway, hissing and spiteful and pathetic just like the rest of my incapable ADHD-implicated brain: “I'm not retarded, okay?! It's not like I'm sick, you don't have to treat me that way.”

“I didn't mean for it to come off like that,” he said. “I'm sorry, I'll leave it alone. I promise we'll be done soon.”

I swallowed all the bitterness, tried to reign in the bad thoughts even though they still tap-danced around in my brain. Ryan's forearm cohered to mine, and the hairs on it were lighter than the hair on his head, and it clung to his forehead in a way that made me want to push it in place. I tried to focus on that, not some half-witted essay I would fail anyway.

I had no intention of quitting our study session in the nearest possible hour. He talked about the importance of a good opening line and how to summarize the essay in a few sentences that made the reader want to know the full story. He talked and talked and talked and some of it might actually expand my limited knowledge on the subject, but most of it consisted of his lips moving and chugging water from the battered plastic bottle to his right. The fan above hammered away, but the small room was chilled and rigid like my mother's hugs.

“Don't use a thesaurus, if you don't know how to use it.”

As if I owned such a thing. I dragged a hand through my hair and squinted at the text in front of me. One of my contact lenses was about to fall out, but if I left the table to adjust it in the bathroom, Ryan might be in a different position, farther away, when I returned.

“Do you want some pistachios?” He held up a pea-green foil bag and poured some into my hand. “I accidentally bought the unsalted ones and they taste like crap.”

I stuttered a “thanks” between crunching the disgusting mucus-colored nuts. He poured from the bag directly into his mouth. His throat was a machinery of muscles and I had no idea why a man guzzling pistachios fascinated me that much.

I made sure to flatten my hair when he looked the other way and chew my bottom lip a little when he didn't. Sit still, even though I longed to flee the uncomfortable chair and yank off the stupid, suffocating shirt. Ryan put down the empty bag of pistachios and picked up on tip number fifty six: 'Similes are like punches; use them sparingly.'

Upon leaving, I leaned against the door frame, unsure of what I wanted to say but certain it wasn't goodbye. The sun had set and the shrunken t-shirt had chilled my body seemingly close to the temperature of Ryan's freezer. I had forgiven him his questioning, or at least packed the episode away in some far of corner of my brain, next to the chaos. He stood on the other side of the door frame and no longer wore the anxious expression or talked about how much I needed to leave and have fun with my friends or about my 'diagnosis'.

“I hope you learned something from this,” he said. He looked at my shirt and I looked at him looking at the shirt, which was actually a bit transparent, but it didn't matter. Strangely enough, I felt smarter. Not smart enough to pass English with pure As or get into college, but smart enough to pass this essay and prove I actually listened to what he said.

So I made him an offer: “how about we make a deal: we meet here every Saturday when I'm not home on weekend – and that's pretty often because my parents suck and live in Nevada – and you help me with my homework? In return I don't judge you for your poor nutrition, and you get to socialize outside of work hours. I mean, come on, were eight pints of ice cream really necessary? Seven just couldn't quench your desire?”

He chewed this over for a few moments before a smile emerged on his face. “First of all, they were on sale. And that's quite generous of you. I graciously accept.” He outstretched his hand for me to shake.

I didn't really want to let go or turn around to leave. When I did, his eyes followed me down the stone path and around the shadows of the bell tower. Through them the air warmed and my stupid, skimpy shirt finally, finally seemed worth the bravado.

.

### 

For the whole week, Spencer remained politely quiet about my whereabouts that night. Every evening when I returned to our room after the post-dinner common activity, he was fast asleep with his essay open in a document on his laptop. I forgot to read it or ask for tips, however lost I remained in the whirlpool of my own. Whenever I reminisced about the tips from Ryan, I only remembered how annoying it felt to have pistachios stuck in my teeth and how easy it felt to sit with him. 

Right after dinner Thursday night, Ian came to buy his pills. He shuffled through the door as if asking for innocent homework and sat down on Spencer's bed like it was his own.

“Sorry I didn't come earlier. My mom didn't send me the cash until yesterday.”

Ian, despite being stuffed away at a boarding school like the rest of us, received a weekly allowance from his mother that far exceeded the acceptable amount for a sixteen year old kid. They had an arrangement going where Ms. Crawford sent her son money so he would stay at school on the weekends when she invited over her current lover. I'd never seen her, but Spencer said she was hot. Like, Pamela Anderson without the plastic surgery hot, whatever that was supposed to mean.

Me and Ian chatted about football and the new waitress at Sally's diner. He was convinced some doctor had fixed her wonky tits, but didn't know where because no one ever traveled out of the town, and the closest plastic surgeon was in Phoenix. I fished the medicine out of my drawer and Ian deposited it in his shirt pocket with what he probably considered an inconspicuous expression. I mean, if we exchanged our goods anywhere but in the shelter of my room, any cop would bust us on the streets upon sight of Ian's almost caricatured suspect-behavior. He handed me a roll of bills, wrapped with a small elastic band and shabby around the edges from being stuffed in his lint-filled pocket.

I counted the cash, inspected the view to ascertain a lack of voyeurs, even if the room was on a steep hill with no climbing opportunities below but chunky bricks and stones with no place to grasp. Then I limped the empty box of pretzels with the money into the gap between my bed and the wall, placed a pillow over it and lay down on my bed, while Ian fiddled with Spencer's blanket.

“You got any more detergent?”

Ian's face cracked to reveal a sly smile as he eyed the bedpost and the contents he knew was hidden in there. “If I gotta wash your dirty laundry, I want a rack of beer, too.”

“No way, those are for Patrick,” said Spencer, who entered the door that very moment, combing his fingers through his wet hair. He cast his towel at Ian, or rather at the pile of laundry behind him, but it smacked Ian in the chest, so that he scowled at both me and Spencer.

“I'm not your cleaning lady.”

Spencer fumbled in the space between his headboard and the mattress, until he found the spliff he searched for and flicked it at Ian. “Now you are,” he said and I would have objected, had the truth in his statement not been so excruciatingly obvious.

Ian stuffed the spliff next to my Ritalin. His shirt was checkered and his mom had probably chosen it for him. “Do you guys want to watch a movie tonight?” He fixed his glasses and looked five years younger. “I got that new Jason Bourne on DVD.”

“What, your mom sent that too?” I didn't mean the words to escape like a lion from an unlocked cage, but they came out roaring and turned Ian pale and stammering.

“Yes, I mean no, she didn't.”

“Sounds great, but we have to study,” Spencer said. “Huge English test coming up this Friday.”

There was no English lit test, but Ian accepted the lie without acknowledging it was one, and left the room. “See ya around,” he mumbled and of course we would. Small school; small campus; barely room enough for my big, idiotic mouth.

As soon as we were alone, Spencer said “that wasn't cool, dude.”

“I'll apologize next time I see him in the laundry room.”

Spencer opened his greasy laptop and began typing on the essay about classism, which he was determined to perfect until Ryan gave him the sparkly A he deserved. “Ever thought about doing your own laundry? You know you're gonna have to when you move out of here. No one wants to do laundry for a college freshman, regardless of how much he pays them.”

“I'm not going to college.” It was weird to utter the words out loud to another person, but by now I had decided, and I wanted Spencer to be the first, if not the only one, to know.

“When did you decide on that?” The glow from his laptop lit up the movement of eyeballs fleeing down the page along his own words. He wasn't really listening to me.

The moment I realized our teacher was hot and I could fuck myself out of staying here, I thought. I didn't say it, though.

Spencer said nothing either, and soon I lay down on my mattress, which had no sheet on because it was dirty and I never did laundry and nothing about this room was remotely cozy. I almost missed Ryan and his smell of books. My thoughts were caught in a whirlpool of essay opening lines and how to finish an assignment and Ryan on the brink of laughter as he corrected my grammar.

I closed my eyes and tried to force the memory of swallowing medicine: the bitter taste on the back on my tongue and the numb that branched through my brain shortly after. I hadn't taken my pills in almost a year and not once had I missed them. Sometimes I got the old paranoia that Greta knew all about my abstinence and sat in her office, not judging me but simply wishing that I would take my medicine.

Not that I cared about her, or anyone, not anymore. The less important things in my life left in the suburbs of Summerlin, the better, because I was never returning to the town again.

Eyes still closed, I recalled the first time I went to her office: the yellow walls and soft green curtains, everything dampened so as not to enrage the patients with anxiety, the schizophrenics, the bipolars, the stick thin girls clutching teddies and their childhoods refusing to grow up. The real crazy people, not me. The experience projected itself on my lids like a movie.

Greta's melodic voice, back when she was young and fresh out of psych school, greener than the plants in her office and sweeter than the lollipop she handed to a six year old Brendon.

“Hi, I'm Greta. I'm going to ask you and your parents a few questions today.”

Brendon nearly disappeared in the cushy sofa, squashed between his mom and her white gloves that nervously wrung an embroidered handkerchief. On the other side, his dad in a boxy suit and deep-set frown. On the way to the clinic in the car, he had continuously sneered “Grace, there is nothing wrong with our son; this is a waste of time” and gripped the steering wheel too tightly for Brendon to believe his dad trusted his own words.

Words, an endless stream of grown-up ones and his mom who blew her powdered nose in a tissue from the box. The scratching noise of Greta's pen, the unwrapping foil of the lollipop before his dad took it away and said “be quiet, the adults are talking.”

He couldn't remember any of what they said, what did Greta ask him? The sun shone so alluringly outside, illuminating promises of grass-stained knees and the victory spirit of a successful soccer game. His mom had promised that they could buy an ice cream cone, but she looked like she had forgotten it, lost the promise in her purse along with her lipstick and the neatly compressed tissues she folded and put in there. 

Greta again: “I asked if you were ready to play a game?”

Brendon nodded. Maybe it wasn't soccer, but games were always fun.

“That's great, now you have to look at this piece of paper. See the bricks, and stack them as they are stacked in the photograph.”

Glossy bricks poured from a fabric sack onto the table. At first it went fine, but soon Greta removed the paper and Brendon struggled to remember if the red or the yellow brick went to the right.

“Are we done soon? You said we could go for ice cream.”

“Brendon, focus on the bricks.”

After a while, Greta gathered the bricks into the bag again. Then she turned her computer around and gave Brendon a big red button.

“When you see the triangle on the screen, I want you to press the button. When you see the square, don't press it. Triangle, press. Square, don't press. Got it?”

Brendon nodded.

More tests, draw this, what does the paint splotch on this paper mean? Can we go now, are we finished, why did mom leave? Is she sad?

Greta said “You did really well, Brendon” and then she handed him another lollipop. “I'll see you and your parents in ten days.” She waved at him as they left her office. His dad's large palm pres-sed to the back of Brendon's striped shirt, urging him forward and out of the office and the clinic.

His mom sat like a red-eyed statue on the return car ride. Brendon didn't dare ask her about the ice cream cone after all, and he sucked on his second lollipop and watched their neighbors, The Millers, wave from their groomed lawns with their sprinklers and their dogs and barbeques. He had a feeling they weren't so much waving at him as much as they waved at the new car the government had granted his dad for business.

Brendon turned seven between the two appointments and deemed himself too mature for another red lollipop. Once again he sat in Greta's office, but the purple pillows and the sofa as green and soft as moss were no longer cheered him up, they just seemed too bright compared to the soporific colors of the waiting room. Words like 'cognitive,' 'hyper active,' 'chronic impairments' and others he didn't understand buzzed around the air like wasps. Brendon sat with his Game Boy while his mom cried into the shoulder of her husband, who had his arm around her but not Brendon.

When they left the office with a prescription for something with a fancy name, Brendon asked “Dad, what does ADHD stand for?”

“It's nothing, son.”

“Dan from kindergarten has it, too. He's nice, though, he always shares his juice box when I forget mine at home.”

His dad said nothing.

.

### 

.

Spencer walked through the door and clapped his phone shut. The sound snapped me out of my daydream, and I sat up straight in bed, realizing through a haze that the moon outside meant I had slept for almost an hour. Spencer only went outside to talk on the phone for one reason.

“What did he say?” I asked.

Spencer stood there in the middle of the room, bouncing on the balls of his feet, debating how much he could tell me, I bet. “Nothing.”

“You were out there for fifty minutes, he must have said something.”

“Well he didn't.” The implied “nothing about you anyway” settled in a bitterness on the back of my tongue like the medicine I never swallowed.

I lay down on the bed again and noticed an indistinguishable brown stain. Once again I reminded myself to put on those sheets. “He knows I'm sorry, right?”

“It was your fault,” Spencer's voice sounded from his bed.

“I know, that's why I keep saying I'm sorry.”

“Doesn't change anything, though. Doesn't change that we're both stuck at this school for another semester.”

“Spence...”

He shook off his accuse and flashed me a gleaming but not a happy smile. “You know what? It doesn't matter. It's just twenty weeks. I can't believe I was even considering throwing off my college education for this.”

Silence. He shot me a look that said “you should do the same, follow my example, it's better for you” but his English grades were immaculate and the rest far sufficed, so how the hell did he know what was better for me?

I opened my laptop, which was stuck on the half begun essay and the headline 'classism and why it sucks', and had to choke back laughter at the thought of me in lecture halls with notebooks full of useful information, glasses perched on my notes and a dry, old professor at the front who praised me for my insight. I had applied for seven fucking universities with the hands of my parents on my shoulders, them saying “we have faith in you, Brendon, at least one of them will accept you.”

Then I remembered a different hand on my shoulder, Ryan's hand, and Ryan sitting next to me, pointing at my pad saying “nice to see you're capable of taking notes after all” but smiling while he said it and offering me pistachios.

“Don't worry about me,” I said. “I found a way to get out of here, while you can stay with your precious essays and chemistry formulas and be the nerd you are deep inside.”

“I'm not a nerd,” Spencer objected, frowning. He tore a hole in a bag of chips and flipped open his laptop. “But do tell me about this genius plan of yours.”

“No way, you're just going to be jealous and want part of it. And that's going to compromise the whole thing.”

Spencer looked curious, glancing from his laptop to me and back, before he surrendered to uncertainty. “You're impossible.”

I made a reminder to use the internet on one of the school's computers. Just a quick search of 'classism'. Something clever someone else had written was bound to appear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've done my utmost to research the topic of ADHD, but if I got anything wrong (not just the ADHD part; it could be anything, really) or came off disrespectful to those who suffer from it, I apologise and I'd be more than happy if you told me what I could improve on. In fact you can comment whatever you like, keeping in mind the ancient profound Confucius saying "kudos and comments keep the writer happy and sane" (...jk). See you next Monday.


	4. Chapter 4

It turned out that the seniors at Saint Franklin's _did_ have an English Lit test that Friday, and as fate would have it, I had studied none of its topics. As soon as we entered the classroom and I spotted the twenty four times six sheets of paper on each table, my soul fled outside into the sun.

Perdition descended on the room, pressing our heads even further down over the tables.

The first question read “Explain the difference between hypotaxis and parataxis” and the rest were no better. Everything blurred together in “explain this phenomenon and list three reasons for why this is more correct than that”, which really meant “show off your stupidity so I can sit and laugh at it in my annex while I eat ice cream and pat myself on the shoulder for being that much better than you.” Judging from the voids between each question, Ryan expected five lines for each answer. 

Might as well not do them.

The ghost of my mom's voice sounded in the back of my head: “which college do you want to attend? I was thinking Dartmouth or Bowdoin up north like your sister, but if you want to study here in Nevada, your dad and I are okay with that, too.”

Look at me, mom, I'll never go to college. I don't even know what parataxis means; I thought it was biology.

Back in Greta's office, my dad addressed her as Doctor Salpeter and asked “can he still go to college?” A cleft divided his brows, one that only disappeared during his public appearances. Those appearances with his arm around my mom, with his lovely, well-behaved daughter Kara at his side. Never his son Brendon, because that kid stayed at home under the pretense he was too small to attend official trifles like election campaigns. Settled in a cocoon of blankets on the floor, he watched the politicians his dad supported on television, until the maid came into the living room and switched to some cartoon.

Then Ryan was at my side, whispering “as long as you're in my classroom, I expect you to at least try to write something on the test.”

I wanted to ask what parataxis meant, but I never got the chance because he wandered back to his desk and re-opened his paperback novel. He glanced sporadically at my desk and pointed to the paper with his left brow raised.

I told myself, okay, you can do this.

Parataxis meant the first part of a sentence, didn't it? But he didn't ask about that. Were they separated by commas or what? What exactly was the point of a semi-colon? Hypotaxis, hypocrite meant someone who said one thing and practiced another, so kind of like my dad. I drew a matchstick figure with a tie and polished shoes underneath the question. 

Just do the fucking test.

Middle school, the stuffy atmosphere of chalk and old lunchboxes. Ms. Williams telling me I could go outside when I finished the test.

Her voice verged on scolding, when she took the paper away and said “I'm going to have to call your parents again, if you refuse to participate in simple things like taking a test. It's the second time this month.”

But that stupid kid Brendon didn't refuse; he just didn't _know_ what Nathaniel Hawthorne wanted to say with his stupid book and his stupid scarlet letters. So he wrote nothing, because at least then no one could tell him how wrong he was.

Ms. Williams wasn't even that bad. She just got tired of dealing with this particular troublesome student, which placed her in the same category as the rest of the world.

Teachers shouldn't wear sneers that disdainful when they handed back semester grades.

And regardless of your stupidity, your friends shouldn't exchange despondent looks when being paired up with you.

Stop wallowing, you idiot, there's ten minutes left of the class. Manically I flipped through the pages to find at least one question that didn't wring my brain like a sponge, but everything I gained from twelve years of prime American education had simply vanished.

The bell rung too soon.

When most of the class had gone to lunch, I handed over the blank test paper. I tripped over my own feet trying to flee from the classroom before Ryan said anything, but he gripped my arm just above the elbow.

“Is this something you want to discuss tomorrow or...?”

His voice was low but urgent, and his face that of a concerned teacher who had yet to find out that empty tests and failed essays were not one hit wonders from my hands.

Hopefully that day would never come.

On my way to lunch, I imagined my final time in Headmaster Daniels' office. Me, nonchalant, while Daniels thundered around the room, his face flushed from bourbon and outrage.

“You slept with a teacher, Urie, this is unacceptable and you cannot continue your education at our school.”

How unfortunate. They'd probably call my parents and I would see them one last time and tell them “so long suckers, I don't need your money”. Or something really creative and insulting, I just had to come up with it. Possibly something that involved implicit details of what got me expelled.

Of course my plan could also get Ryan fired, but fuck that. The man hated the school almost as much as I did. Every time he entered the classroom, his shoulders slumped a little and he never participated in meals. So fuck everything, fuck it, fuck the school, fuck Ryan. Definitely fuck Ryan.

No high school graduate diploma, fuck that, I didn't need it. I could wait tables or find some bar that would let me entertain with a guitar when I turned twenty one and they would actually let me inside. Save up, go to Europe, where I could actually get an interesting job without a high school degree. Find Jon, apologize, finally start my real life.

I didn't need a diploma from Saint Franklin's; I needed a departure.

.

### 

.

Kara called a bit before midnight that evening. “You awake?” she whispered in that hoarse voice of hers. In the background, I heard the low thud of a bass line, someone yelled “shots, shots, shots” and what sounded like a mariachi band played the national anthem on speed. I guessed she was back at Bowdoin.

“Yeah,” I whispered back. Spencer already slept not so quietly, no danger of waking him, but the hall guard was due to check on us a few minutes later.

She was the first to ask “how are you”, even if under the circumstances, it should have been me to do so.

“I'm okay. You?”

“Good.” She paused to take a drag of a cigarette. A door slammed and a man's voice called for her to return to their party, and the happy and carefree tone of her reply must have meant that university had regained some of its fun. That she was better. Healing. “But listen, I just called to say I can't make it home for spring break.”

“Oh. Have you told mom and dad?”

“No, but I'll do it soon.”

Cautious, I asked her why, and she exhaled deeply. Her fingernails clacked against the receiver. “They'll be disappointed that I'm the only one there,” I said. How was I supposed to deal with Aunts Millie, Josephine and all the other family members who would undoubtedly come to see me now that I returned for a brief while? This wasn't meant to happen; I wasn't meant to be forced to deal with them again. If the plan had worked back then, and Sharp was still alive, I wouldn't have to go home and exchange pleasantries with family members who had both feet and one arm in the grave already. Quickly I departed that particular train of thought; it was unfair to her when she finally seemed to have stabilized her life and herself.

“They'll manage. It's not like I'm any better,” she said.

“No but you'd...” She would receive empathy and soft pats on the shoulder, not sharp punches to her spine and three uncles asking when she would get a boyfriend, 'cause hopefully “ya ain't queer, are ya?” followed by boisterous guffaws. And still I craved this sick empathy over something that should never happen to anyone, and god, I was so selfish for it.

“I miss you,” she said after a while. “You're not around every day.”

“Well, I wasn't around last year either. I'm in Arizona now, remember, I've been for a long time.”

Then she went to college, and there was absolutely no point of my return to Vegas. I couldn't help but idealize the idea that maybe if she hadn't gone, maybe if we'd both just stayed back in Vegas, none of this would ever have happened, but then something else would have happened, something equally bad or worse. A car crash, a fatal accident, someone who went blind, bankrupt, crazy.

“Still. How's your cute friend doing?”

“I don't have cute friends – what, you mean Spencer?”

She laughed “Yeah, that guy! He's only two years younger than me, it's not a cougar thing.”

“I don't know, isn't it kind of early?” And still I hadn't asked her if she was okay, I'd just been thinking and thinking and thinking, but never managed to get the words over my lips: “how are you really feeling?”

Her laughter stilled, as did the music in the background.

Spencer rolled over in his sleep. Kara cleared her throat. I imagined her outside campus, inhaling her cigarette smoke and the east coast air between frosting-pink lips.

She changed the delicate subject by asking “You still take your meds, right?”

“Of course,” I lied. “Is Lizzie still giving you a hard time?”

“No, she's been tame since I beat her ass in poker last Friday.”

“You never taught me to play before you left.” She always claimed that she would teach me all kinds of things like how to play Where Is My Mind on Aunt Millie's grand piano, but in the end the only thing she ever taught me was the filthy art of smoking.

“I tried, but you kept throwing the cards at me and leaving the table.”

“Poker's boring,” I objected. “Why couldn't you have been a Black Jack kinda girl?”

Kara chuckled on the other line. Something scratched, probably a nearby clutter of bushes and someone making out among them. “You've been away from Vegas too long. Anyway, Josh wants me back at the party, so I'll talk to you later, yeah?” She smacked her lips together near the receiver, and soon left me with the buzzing of the dead phone line and Spencer's laptop on his desk.

“Bye,” I mumbled to the silent room.

The noises outside rendered sleep impossible. It seemed the birds had teamed up with a raccoon or two and started a heavy metal band, and their racket kept me sighing and writhing on my mattress, eyes wide open while Spencer snored in the other bed.

I retraced the conversation with my sister in my head, the same as every other conversation we always had after she left home to study in Normandy for eight months, then for college. And my parents missed her so much, they sent me off to the shrink in an attempt to regain at least a quart of a normal child.

I met Greta Salpeter for the third time in my life while Kara was in France. The memory of this meeting was more lifelike; her office smelled and looked different to thirteen year old me. It could have been due to a different perfume or the fact that she had grown older and had more wrinkles. Her furniture was tarnished, and she looked less hopeful than when faced with six year old me. Or maybe I saw more clearly through everyone's bullshit.

“It's been a while,” she said and sat down on the chair next to the sofa, hands folded. I stared at the wall in front of me and the watercolor reproductions. When I didn't talk, she did.

“Your parents finally allowed us to prescribe you medication. What do you think changed their mind?”

Kara, always Kara. If she thought it was a good idea, of course it was a good idea. Forget asking me, the guinea pig used for this novel medication. I still didn't get the big deal; people with diagnoses were mentally ill; I was _fine_. “They probably just want to sedate me so I don't make a scene when we have guests.”

“And why would you make a scene? You seem like a nice kid to me.”

“I'm not.” At least I didn't want to be, not anymore. To prove my point, I threw my feet on her table, even though she didn't deserve to have me sully her furniture like that.

She ignored the rebellion and turned in her ergonomically correct chair to retrieve her notepad. She covered up a sliver of a smile on her face, but she was the type of person who smiled with their whole body, from her mouth to her voice and her back, even when it was turned. If she knew my every thought, what was the point of showing up at her office every Wednesday and face the same old skeleton girls and vio-lent boys in the waiting room? Before she could assuage me with the shrink-rant she undoubtedly was about to embark upon, I sat up and removed my feet.

“I'm tired of being that kid in school, you know?”

“No, I don't, you have to elaborate on that a bit.”

“Even though I'm not, I don't really know anymore. But that's all I am to them. The only reason no one bullies me is because their dads are afraid of my dad.”

Afraid of his money, afraid of his power. They still thought I was weird, though, passing up on Sunday baseball games and movie nights because my parents had to drag me to church and show off their nuclear family.

Greta noted this on her pad. “Could it not be because they respect you too much to be mean to you?”

“Nobody respects anybody anymore. It's obviously been decades since you last went to middle school.”

She smiled softly. “No, I remember. All the slumber parties and gossip, it was dreadful.”

Thirteen, soon to be fourteen year old me said “honestly, I can't wait to go to high school,” and if that wasn't a sign I needed psychiatric counseling and medication, then I don't know what was. If I was Greta, I would have fixated me in a belt right then and there.

“And why do you think high school will be better?”

My middle school self, wide-eyed and in horribly out-of-fashion clothes, asked “it won't?” like I genuinely had no idea that nothing would ever be different. Not the teachers, not the homework, not the conversations about which girls were whores and primadonnas. And Kara was always one of them until I joined the conversation, sometimes even after; she was the holy grail they all wanted to sleep with, but she was my sister and I received blue eyes and burst lips and suspension from school for every punch I delivered to their jaws.

You know, If she ever met those boys and heard them, she would have kneed them in the balls, stomped on their faces with her spiked heels and scratched their eyes out with her hundred and twenty dollar-manicured nails; she fought for herself until everyone else bled. Until the one time she didn't. 

Back then Greta never wanted to talk about Kara, but I needed to talk about Kara and how I felt a constant urge to protect her, even now. Especially now.

The memory of the appointment slipped further away as I balanced on the border between con-sciousness and sleep. Greta's voice grew somnolent when she leaned forward and said “that's not what I'm saying. I'm asking you why you think so.”

At first I thought it was weird, how she talked. Eventually I learned that all shrinks avoided questions and asked how their patient was instead. When I ended my sessions with her six months later, she knew every inch of my being and I only knew her last name and favorite chocolate: Cadbury's Caramel.

I never replied. She let go of my silence and found my new medication in her drawer. The small white pills blurred, she left the room and never came back and it turned into a dream about something and someone else.

.

### 

.

I had rediscovered the t-shirt from my last study session in my laundry pile, doused it with deodorant and put it on again. I prepared a series of responses to whatever Ryan had to say about my miserably empty test, most of them lathered in a good dose of innuendo. While I waited for Ryan to let me inside, I rehearsed them in my head.

God, I'm so sorry; I didn't study because I was busy daydreaming about you. Is that a new shirt? Have I ever told you that you're really smart? Should I bat my eyelashes? No, only girls did that. I raked a hand through my hair, messing up everything I had carefully constructed, and there were strands in every direction right as Ryan opened the door.

We sat down at the table with an appropriate distance between us, Ryan with folded hands on the table and me with sweaty palms under it.

“You wrote nothing on the test yesterday. Why is that?”

All my witty preparation vanished. Because I was too distracted staring at my teacher's ass. Because I didn't want to. Because I was stupid.

I brushed it off along with an imaginary dust speck on my shirt, which I had meticulously gone over with a lint-roll only half an hour earlier. “If you talk to everyone who fails a test, you'll have no time for anything else.”

“Surprisingly, your classmates all did okay on that test. I'm pretty sure none of them studied much either, so why? Are you trying to piss me off by not doing your schoolwork because I cut you some slack that one time?”

Oh, he was so close. And he smelled kind of... sweet? A faint tang of hard work, coffee and ginger. I concentrated on inhaling, five seconds of withheld breath, exhale, all the while I looked Ryan in the eyes, but not too much. Not staring, but not blinking so often that he thought I lied to him.

“I'm not. It was difficult, honestly.”

“So you gave up instead of writing anything.”

“No!” I yelped. Then, quietly: “no, that's not it.”

“Would it help if we went over the questions together and I explained it to you?”

I gathered my composure and nodded. Sure, whatever. The reminder of freedom, no more tests at all, knocked at my temple. I brushed a tuft of hair from my forehead and bit my lip. Ryan didn't look the slightest bit interested. Frowning, he pointed to the first question, explain the difference between hypotaxis and parataxis.

He picked up a pen and scratched down _Brendon drinks soda. He is thirsty._ “This is parataxis. Basically, think of the 'para' part of the word as 'parallel'. These two sentences have equal importance and each can stand alone. Are you with me so far?”

I nodded and dragged my eyes from the words coming out from between his lips.

“If I write Brendon takes a sip of his soda, which the refrigerator has chilled while he was outside, although he isn't thirsty, can you tell me what the difference is?”

“I'm not thirsty in the second sentence,” I said, but he meant something else, I knew that, and felt infinitely idiotic as soon as the words had left my mouth.

“Uh, that too. I meant that you can say 'Brendon drinks soda' without the rest of the sentence, but not 'which the refrigerator has chilled, although he isn't thirsty' and have it make sense. Hypotaxis is when sentences are subordinate to one another, dependent on each other. It's also called subordinating style. That makes sense, right?”

It made no sense at all, but I nodded anyway. “Yeah, I guess. But why is it so important?”

Ryan tore off another page. “It's important when we write, because a book or an essay filled with sentences like 'Brendon is thirsty. He drinks soda. The man walks his dog.' is boring in the end. Just as well it strains your brain to read long, overly complicated sentences, which hypotaxis sometimes turns into. Reading should be exercise for your brain, not torture.”

He looked almost expectant, tapping his pen and looking from me to the paper. Then he handed me the pen. “Here, you try.”

_Saint Franklin's Boarding School for Adolescent Boys sucks. Brendon hates studying there._

At least it was true. “That's para...”

“Parataxis, right, keep going.”

_Brendon hates studying at Saint Franklin's Boarding School for Adolescent Boys, which sucks because it's a terrible school._

He let out a sigh of relief. “Thank god, you get it; I feared I'd have to explain it to you all over again.”

“No, you're a good teacher.” I tilted my head to the side, eyeing his bare arms no longer crossed over his chest but resting casually next to mine on the table. “Best I ever had.”

That turned him kind of flustered; his eyes flashed momentarily; pink shot up in his cheeks, and he drew back from the paper and pen where his hand had almost touched mine.

I widened my eyes in mock surprise at the effect my words had on him. “What? Not used to praise?”

“It's... never mind.”

We practiced a few more sentences before we moved on to the next question. As the evening progressed, Ryan's explanations grew longer and his voice louder. He popped open two cans of cola in the middle of his books, my test, our papers. Some of it spilled on the table, and when I joked about his tendency to slop food on the assignments, he laughed about it instead of berating me. Cautiously, granted, like he didn't know whether or not it was appropriate to laugh at a student's joke, but a laughter nonetheless.

Some of the stuff he said about writing and books even made sense. He looked so proud of himself for explaining something right that sometimes I kept silent about not understanding it. I could always read up on the difficult subjects in my school books, most of which I hadn't even bothered to open this year.

It was funny how a pen sticky with fingerprints, cola and my hair products created a form of electricity every time it exchanged hands. I'll be honest and say I only wrote so much because I needed an excuse to pick it up and touch him again.

The paper filled with his spindly scribbles and mine, which looked most of all like a bird had stepped in ink and minced across the page.

“Your handwriting is awful,” he said.

I huffed and laid down the pen with all our fingerprints on it. “Ever heard not to judge a book by its cover? I thought that'd be just your quote.”

“It's kind of worn out, isn't it?”

I touched a tassel on the rosary bead bracelet he wore alongside his wrist watch. His palm twitched, but laid otherwise still, and I debated whether or not to trace my fingers along the veins on it. In the end I decided not to, though the idea tempted me a lot. He didn't even look like he would mind. “It would so fit your wardrobe, though. You'd be a walking antiquity.”

Shaking his head, he said “no, if I had a quote it should be something I said, something more striking than what people say after a first date that went poorly.”

“Better start saying smart things then,” I retorted, beaming at him to let him know it was only a joke. He already sounded way smarter than I did.

Ryan scoffed and retreated his hand. I tried to tell myself it didn't matter, that at least it had been there, but I was still left with the same feeling as when you sprint to reach a train, then miss it by mere seconds.

When I left the annex ten minutes before curfew, I wished with every fiber of my being that I could stay just a bit longer. I gathered a dose of courage I thought I didn't need and reached out to scratch at a hole in Ryan's threadbare t-shirt. He didn't flinch at the touch: progress. “See? You're a walking antiquity. Old man.”

Ryan smiled at me, somewhat lenient, and began closing the door. “Go home, it's way past your bedtime.” Before he could close it entirely, I set my foot in the gap.

“Since we didn't finish the test... should I come over tomorrow? Before class maybe?”

His eyes roamed across me, and if I had brought something school-related with me, like my backpack or a book or even one of Spencer's pencils, I wouldn't be so glaringly obvious. But Spencer had started locking his desk drawer since all his writing tools mysteriously disappeared, so that wellspring had dried out for a long while, or at least until I learned how to pick locks without leaving traces.

All Ryan's scrutinizing seemed to say “and whose fault was that? You and your fingers that you can't keep to yourself,” but his mouth said “I think we did enough for now. Come over next Saturday if you fail your essay as miserably as the last one.”

I almost objected and suggested that we could do that tomorrow. Or tonight; I didn't need sleep. But the moon shone through two sets of windows in Ryan's annex, retreating behind a cloud while he retreated into the building and locked the door behind him.

As I crept back to my room via my usual route, past the bell tower and the shrubbery at its door, I lit a cigarette. Not a rebellion against the school, although the dozens of cigarette butts along the path witnessed against the contempt of many students. Neither did I do it to be grown-up in the hopes Ryan might notice me from his window and think “wow, he's so mature. There would be nothing wrong with us sleeping together,” yeah right, like that would ever happen. It would probably work the exact opposite way and leave me with hours of lectures about how unhealthy it was. He might even snatch the cigarette right from my lips and put it out, clicking his tongue and wasting perfectly good nicotine. It would be worth it, though, for those brief milliseconds of physical contact. I wanted to feel if his fingers were calloused or what the ink stains from his pen tasted like. 

Spencer slept (or pretended to sleep) when I re-entered the room and closed the door behind me. I nearly waked him to gush about how well it all went, about Ryan's old habits and his ink-stains and what parataxis meant. I actually went as far as to bend down at the bedside, ready to rustle Spencer out of his sheets and triumphantly disclose my whole plan, when his phone lit up next to me.

_we werent srs or anything anyway hav u told bden abt it?_

Told me about what? The message was from Jon, of course.

The little neon display allured from its position on the bed stand, but the phone was probably locked. I debated whether or not to pick it up and read the conversation. They were talking about me; I had every right to know what they said. The seven words of the message brought back thoughts of Peter Sharp, his rotting corpse. Even if it was evident that the police no longer investigated the case, I would sleep uneasily at night until I no longer lay in my bed at Saint Franklin's, but somewhere comfortable and far, far away.

Before I could do anything, Spencer turned around in his sleep, mouth agape and drooling on his pillow. My finger hovered above it, ready to form the fish hook inside his cheek and wake him, but in the end I returned to my own bed. Once again I lay awake while the night wailed outside, thinking about hypotactic sentences and Ryan who explained them.

.

### 

.

The following Tuesday, us seniors at Saint Franklin's Boarding School For Adolescent Boys received our dreaded essays about classism. Before that English lesson, I believed I had done a half decent job, but my self-esteem crashed like a giant avalanche of insecurities and grammatical mistakes as Ryan passed the graded assignments to each student, who responded with a groan or a “not fair Mr. Ross”.

Ryan slung out “Tedious!”, “Zero punctuation skills”, “a complete misinterpretation”, and “Saporta, you flunked it” like the insults were candy and the students deserved them.

Afterward he marched to the desk, overlooked the class with crossed arms and a grim expression and said: “Your graduation is in five months, and this is the standard of the class. Today we're going to do some reading, and I hope you all have an un-edited copy of your essay, because you'll be reading each others' work and correcting it. I've paired you up in six groups for this task.”

As Ryan listed these groups, I flipped to find my grade. A diminutive improvement from last time, at least now the mathematical sign next to the letter E was positive. There was no reason to even try and talk to him about it; below the grade was scribbled _we'll talk about it Saturday._

So I eagerly anticipated this Saturday and others to come for less superficial reasons than the lack of lessons and its status as the only day on the weekend where the solitude of our room guaranteed that Spencer would not come home and disturb me with my hand down my pants.

Ryan was still Mr. Ross in class. Sometimes he would go as far as to call me out on some behavior, which, granted, was not always my best. But I tried. In fact I tried so much that I had no time for any other assignments and resorted to bribing Ian into writing them for me. In return I promised him that we could watch his Jason Bourne flick, after which he frowned and asked “Jason Bourne?”, but we never got around to it anyway because other things occupied our weekends: him going home and me receiving homework aid from Ryan.

Soon the Saturdays turned to Sundays and Wednesdays as well, or whenever either of us had time. I ended up only using the communal showers when everyone else were scarfing down their cheese pasta and Thursday sundaes in the dining hall.

I'd purchased a couple of disposable razors in the local drugstore, but I cut myself during the first attempts and was forced to clumsily dress myself with my back to Spencer, so he asked no questions about why I had apparently tried to chuck off my own dick in the pursuit of resembling a prepubescent boy. But all of it prepared me for the day – the soon arising day – where I would lean in a little too close during some movie night in Ryan's annex and melt him like putty in my hands. So he wouldn't object when I finally straddled him and pinned him to that hideous couch of his.

Along with the razors, my weekly supply consisted of foil-wrapped lollipops, which, in light of my lunch-skipping, constituted a satisfying snack during class. If I swirled my tongue around it only when Ryan had his back to the blackboard and his face toward me, his eyes would drift to the candy and occasionally he might spend a few seconds looking for his lost composure in the chalk tray.

I could almost ignore the hours where I actually had to read Wuthering Heights, when the prospect promised an equal amount of hours discussing it with Ryan.

“You're as stubborn as Cathy, do you know that?” He chuckled when I turned another page in the book and extracted all the phrases without absorbing any of their intent. If cramming homework for three hours meant three hours spent with Ryan, working up to the point in my plan where homework was unnecessary, then I had spent those three hours well.

I tilted my head, bit my lip and asked “oh yeah? Why do I have to be the girl? You're nothing like Heathcliff.”

Ryan ceased chuckling and cleared his throat. “I didn't mean it like that.” His eyes fell from me and down at the paper with my scraggly handwriting. “Wuthering Heights isn't a love story, by the way, don't write that.”

“Every book is a love story. That's all people in literature do, they fall in love or they fall out of love and the government forces high school students to read about it.”

Then, with curfew as his excuse, he politely asked me to leave, and when I hesitated to abdicate from my seat, he pulled out the chair with me on it and, way too roughly, yanked me up and shoved me toward the door and out of it. When I looked up the hill, his figure no longer silhouetted the curtains in his window.

Other examples: my newest set of grades tainted by his concern about the response from my parents. Honestly I couldn't care less about them, but by feigning remorse as he offered to gently break the news to them, I made him believe otherwise. Then followed another essay and the movie Ryan allowed me to watch before the rest of the class. He said he wanted to verify that I actually watched it, and the only method was by strict surveillance. He monitored me watching the screen, eating popcorn out of the bowl conveniently placed in his lap, licking the salt off my fingers one by one.

All of those hours added up to our acquaintance. I didn't yet dare to define it as a relationship, but it inched toward the apex of one.

I didn't have to laugh too hard at his jokes, because most of them were funny and the rest I politely ignored and sipped soda instead, trying not to chug the can in one go. I never had to force excuses for touching him; his collars and hair were suddenly full of lint and specks of paper, and he let me dust them off of him.

He said “I'm watching you” that time with the movie, but he wasn't really; he graded freshman papers next to me. The fan blew pollen, a meek Arizona heat and the scent of Ryan – shirtless due to washing day – into my nostrils, and often my eyes strayed from the movie toward the bead of sweat in his navel. The other students certainly never experienced that, and whichever satisfaction I felt had less to do with jealousy than with satisfaction about the pieces of my plan coming together.

.

### 

.

“Urie, are you listening?” a gruff voice sounded. When I looked up, Mr. Hall stood bowed over my table, his gut pushing it further into mine so the furniture was awkwardly locked between us. The ventilation in the chemistry classroom had broken weeks ago, so an odor of sulphide and sweat wafted into my face.

“Of course,” I replied and shuffled away my bullet point list of what to remember before visiting Ryan that evening.

“Then you can repeat the formula for calculating kelvin, right?”

I cursed internally at the now wiped-out blackboard. My curious classmates collectively turned toward me, expecting either a miracle or my usual failure to respond with anything remotely intellectual. Something with weight... No, kelvin was temperature, wasn't it? I leered at Sisky's chemistry book between us, but Mr. Hall slammed the thing shut, dropped it to the floor and slid it under the table with his foot.

“Kelvin, Urie, get a move on.”

“I forgot,” I said to the table. Someone snickered in the back row.

“Forgot?” boomed Mr. Hall. “If any of you _forget_ something as simple as the formula for kelvin, I can do nothing as a teacher to educate your half-baked brains.”

“Chemistry isn't even on the SATs,” Gabe pointed out at the adjacent table, where he leaned on the defect venting chute.

Hall snapped at him: “you think I won't test you before you graduate, Saporta? Just praise yourself lucky that you know the subject better than mr. Urie here.” Not bothering to turn toward me again, Hall said “pick up your partner's book, and remember your goddamn notes the next time.”

I conceded and picked up the book from its bed of dust underneath the table. Sisky mouthed an apology while Mr. Hall stomped up to the blackboard. Easy enough for Sisky; he got good marks in all the teachers' books, the giant suck-up that he was.

While the rest of the class took notes, I browsed my bullet point list: the small _wash whole body not just armpits and crotch, speaking of, steal Spencer's shampoo and shave?_ at the bottom of it.

Eventually Ryan would yield. I spent my classes plotting out the day, the hour, the incident where he would fall into my trap, under my spell, like a sailor to a siren.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The American education system is a bigger mess than I am. And shoutout to you for still reading this story; I love you.


	5. Chapter 5

Me and Spencer were occupying the school's laundry room one afternoon because Ian was having the flu and couldn't get out of bed, let alone wash other people's clothes. I had a chemistry report and two essays to write, which I was half-heartedly completing with a pencil on top of a quaking washing machine while Spencer observed from the side.

“You know, you're not supposed to wash jeans at ninety degrees,” he said and chewed off a bite of his chocolate bar. “They'll shrink and we already see enough of your butt in class.” He fetched a pair of uniform slacks from someone else's laundry load and compared them to a pair of my jeans. “How do you even fit your balls in there, they're literally girl's pants.”

“They're not. The saleslady in Louis said they're unisex.”

Spencer began laughing so hard, he choked on the chocolate and I had to pat him on the back until he choked up a peanut on the floor. “ _Louis?_ You're on first name basis with the Louis Vuitton store in Crystals? Dude, you are such a stereotype.”

“What? I shopped there regularly. They gave me discounts. Why do you care anyway?”

Spencer picked up the peanut, examined it, and dropped it into an empty dryer. “I don't, it's just that if you keep shrinking your clothes, you'll have to walk around in either your uniform or your birthday suit and neither is a sight for sore eyes.”

“Shut up, I look perfect. At least I don't have a muffintop.”

He let out a sound reminiscent to the whistle of a tea kettle, which he tried to obscure as another cough. “I do not have a muffintop; what the hell is your problem?”

I reached out the hand I wasn't writing with and poked Spencer in the stomach, right in the soft squishy part from all his chocolate bars. The machine rumbled and spat out steam, soaking one corner of my notes, which were hardly worth much in the first place.

“When did you get so obsessed with your looks anyway? It's like, you spend thirty minutes in the shower and thirty minutes afterward fixing your hair. What's next, makeup? Nail polish? Who the hell are you trying to look good for?”

“There's no shame in being well-groomed.” I hustled off the washing machine and snatched the remaining bar from Spencer's hand. I chewed through the gooey fudge and his fingerprints on the half-melted chocolate, before I went into the hallway because I forgot my laundry basket back in our room.

.

### 

.

Since my mom so kindly had canceled my spring break, I asked my friends what they would be doing. Of course I was too late – there was only one week left – but since when had asking hurt anybody? Spencer was going home to Nevada to visit his family.

Gabe would be skiing in Vermont. William needed to trek across the country, stacked in the back of his dad's station car, piled at his feet books about the history of each individual school. Pete was going skiing too, but somewhere up in Norway, and Joe had gotten a job backstage for the few gigs his cousin's band played up in Chicago. He boasted about it all week but when I asked him to name one of their songs and he couldn't, he shut up.

In short, none of my friends were available and certainly none of them cared for taking me with them on their final high school adventures around the world. When Ian materialized in my doorway with a load of my laundry in exchange for an extra Ritalin or two, I asked him about his vacation plans.

“Going home to see my girlfriend,” he said, not without pride. “We have our two month anniversary next Wednesday, so I'm taking her out to dinner.”

What, at Olive Garden? Or did his mom pay for that, too?

“What about you, what are your plans? It's been a while since you went home, right? What was it, Christmas? Because I remember you talking about your present, that Swiss watch, wasn't it a Du Maurier?”

The way he pronounced it, 'Doo Mowrir', hurt my ears in the tune of nails on a blackboard.

“Baume and Mercier,” I corrected. Why didn't he leave? I'd already given him his pills. I turned my back to him and began throwing random items in my suitcase to make it look like I was packing a bag for a vacation.

“Are you okay?” he asked, voice as small as the rest of him. “You don't look okay”

“I'm fine,” I grit out between my teeth. “Don't you have to pack or something?”

The guy just wouldn't take a hint. He even flopped down on my bed and dusted off my old sneakers with routine motions. “Already did. What do you think of the new teacher? Because I have him for English and he's really cool; he lets us read all these awesome books I've never even heard of before – did you know he used to lecture up in Massachusetts? I think it was Massachusetts, at least. Could be Maine. Anyway, I just finished Invisible Monsters – he told me to read that, said I'd enjoy it –”

I blocked out his voice and sat down on the bed next to him, occasionally nodding when his mouth slowed to below the speed of light, allowing him to bask in what might have been the only attention anyone ever gave him besides his mom. And the girlfriend, right.

“– and my last essay, he gave me an A! I've never gotten an A before.”

“That's nice,” I said, giving him a queasy smile. “What was it about?”

“I wrote about public school versus private schools like ours, and how the tuition creates unnecessary gaps between classes, the social ones, I mean. Lauren – that's my girlfriend – she's not all that rich, but she's really smart and she wants to go to Harvard but her family can't afford the tuition. Mr. Ross told me it was more insightful than some of his senior students' and that I should pursue a career in writing.”

In my head Ryan appeared late at night with Ian at his table, laughing at his essays, not because Ian forgot to finish a sentence or put commas in half his paragraphs like I did, but because Ian was insightful and witty, and he was small and might fit snugly into Ryan's lap in the avocado-colored musty couch, so much nicer and more manageable than me. “He did?” My voice was way lower and squeakier than I wanted it to be, and I couldn't stop myself from asking him about when he last had pistachios.

He peered at me above the thick rim of his glasses, befuddled. “Why? I'm allergic to pistachios. And peanuts, too.”

It was all so stupid; I wasn't even jealous, but I was so relieved he wasn't screwing our English teacher that I pulled him in for a hug so tight, his glasses squashed against my collarbone.

“What are you doing?” he asked into my sweatshirt.

I apologized and ruffled his wilderness of curls back in place. He looked mostly confused, but a smile developed on his face, folding and unfolding at the corners like he couldn't contain it. “Have a nice spring break, right?”

Ian nodded and left the room, but kept looking over his shoulder at me in the middle of my half-full suitcases that were never going anywhere. He wasn't so bad.

.

### 

.

On the first Saturday of the break, I was as alone as one could be with two teachers, headmaster Daniels and four freshmen whose families didn't want them home either. I would execute the first step of my plan, and if I had it my way, it would be the only step, so I wore the tightest pants I owned and shoved a mouth spray in one of the pockets along with my camera phone.

Ryan mistook my impromptu appearance for a thirst for knowledge, so we studied for the first two hours of the evening. We ended up on the couch, not entwined, but statue-like next to each other in the middle of it, our legs almost abutting. Me with two books about Great American Writers of the ninetieth and twentieth centuries on my knees, him tearing apart a tissue and placing each fragment in a line on his thigh. Blood rushed through my ears, drowning the sound of his speech.

We were talking about SAT scores and me not taking them until now. The point was lost to me then, back when I thought I could dodge graduation. It still was, except Ryan actually made sense when he said “you'll be glad you took them later.”

I said “I'll fail them, everyone says they're too difficult.”

Kara breezed through them, obviously. Jon did, too, though he brushed it off as that year being less difficult than all the others. Liars, both of them.

Ryan's mouth formed the question “are you afraid of getting a bad score?” Only at this point, never before, it struck me that I was genuinely right about failing them. I would because I'd never studied for anything in the past four months; I would fail those SATs and I would fail the rest of my life. My focus narrowed to only his hand tearing up that tissue into little snowflakes, like he didn't know how to place himself when I occupied all the space on the couch and sofa table. The worst part was this: I didn't care about any of my revelations. All I cared about was for him to stop tearing up the damn tissue and put his hand on my knee, and if I knew all the literature stuff about Brontë and Hemingway, maybe that meant he would.

The otherwise so cushy sofa underneath me was like gravel. My every cell hummed with the urge to jump up and flee the annex. It's survival instinct, I told myself, and I would sprint out the door and twice around campus to preserve it. Maybe steal a few grams of pot from Spencer's stock and calm down that way. But Ryan would demand an explanation for my flight, so I grabbed one of those ridiculous brocade cushions and hugged it. Sitting here, curled around a pillow and my own knees while the blood burned in my ears and pop quizzes and textbooks littered the table in front of me, that wasn't survival; it was just pathetic. I was sniveling like a fucking toddler in front of Ryan, who said nothing and handed me a tissue from the box on the table.

“We can take a break for now.” He gave my back half of a shallow little stroke, then retreated his hand like he'd burned himself.

“I can't remember any of it, I don't know if it was Steinbeck or Vonnegut who wrote Grapes of Wrath and I think it's a stupid fucking title and a stupid fucking subject –” Another undesired sob rattled my ribcage, and I dug my nails into the pillow and pretended it was Ryan's back, except at that moment I despised him and his books and ambitions on my behalf, and I wanted him to stay away and hug me at the same time.

“Leave me alone,” I seethed.

“I can't,” he reasoned, “I live here; this is my place.”

There it was again; his fingers brushed across my neck and ignited all the nerve endings in my spine with the notion that I wasn't a screw-up, that his motives for spending time with me differed from his paycheck and because headmaster Daniels and the school board forced him to. I let go of the pillow and buried my face in my palms so he didn't see me crying. It was too late, everything was ruined, my whole plan was ruined, because crying wasn't attractive, crying wasn't mature and now I was stuck at this school for even longer because I couldn't contain myself.

“You don't have to get straight As, and I'm not going to give them to you just because I like you, but don't give up either. I know you haven't done so well on tests.”

Unspoken: or assignments or projects or group work or anything.

I said “I'm bad at everything,” because in that moment I was. A wet mixture of my own breath, tears and mucus intermingled and glued my hair to my cheeks, but I couldn't bear to look up and face him either.

“I'm sorry,” I mumbled into my hands, his still on my back.

“Don't be. It really isn't your fault.”

I pulled another tissue from the box and blew my nose, nodding. The sound resembled that of the dying elephant on the television before me. I winced internally at the idea of his palm fitting my neck as if it had been molded around it, especially now that my tears had deprived me of that hand ever touching me anywhere else. He sat there patiently, observing the mess I had dissolved into. Swollen eyes, swollen face, shrunken dignity, but he didn't mind judging from his crooked smile of sympathy.

“Should've called it Grapefruits of Wrath instead,” I sniffled. “Grapefruits sound angrier to me.”

“It's actually a line from The Battle Hymn of The Republic, but if it's any consolation I think Steinbeck's pretentious, too. I suggest we visit his grave at night and hurl some grapefruits at it.”

I laughed at the vision of us sneaking into an out-of-state graveyard carrying baskets of fruit and him untangling ivy from his hair. Ryan's quieter chuckle reverberated in my head, trembled through my insides and finally settled in my stomach in a weird sense of belonging. Then I pushed the camera phone deeper into my pocket.

.

### 

.

My first attempt had gone awry, but I hadn't scared off Ryan completely, and I spent loads of time with him still. It wasn't like I had anything else to do but sit around in my room and listen to music and read my old magazines about news that were far from relevant at this point in my life.

I invited myself over to Ryan's annex most nights, where we watched TV and he lamented about having to buy ice cream for two people.

The more time we spent together, the warmer the weather grew. On this particular day in March, the temperature was a staggering eighty five degrees and the remaining four freshmen deserted the lawn to devour their grocery store lunch inside the cool dining hall.

Midday Arizona wasn't for everyone, especially not for Ryan, who had placed himself under a striped parasol with a book. From behind I approached the little oasis and tapped him lightly on the shoulder. He jerked alive from his consumption of another Great American Classic His Students Would Have To Read The Following Week, this time _Lolita_ by Vladimir Nabokov.

“I thought you spent eight to six indoors,” I said, but was relieved to find him outside for once, so I didn't have to waste away my precious time behind closed drapes on his couch.

He meticulously placed an old postcard between the pages and abandoned the fictional universe. “Yeah, well, there was a rosary hanging from the fan; it got stuck and the damn thing crashed. God literally drove it to its deathbed.”

I slumped down in the patch of sun next to him with a low groan at the impact. Sitting here, we watched the town simmer and swelter in the heat until it became nothing but blurs of purples and yellows. Having forgot about his presence, I fished a cigarette from my inner blazer pocket along with a stolen lighter and lit it.

“I didn't know you aimed for a cancer diagnosis.” He wafted the smoke away from his face with one hand and coughed.

“I only smoke sometimes, mostly because it dulls everything, including your appetite.”

“So go eat lunch with the other kids.”

Other kids? Thanks a lot. I shouldn't have defended my habit to this responsible adult with his book and his parasol and pale legs stretched out so far the sunlight cut off only a few inches below his knees.

“But then I'll be forced to talk with freshmen. Maybe they'll want me to play boardgames with them. Or need me to change their diapers.” I huffed and dappled the cigarette ash on the ground to my right.

Even if the freshmen were less inclined than my friends to link my absence with one of their teachers taking a break in the sun, the fraction left of school personnel might notice. Might think we had a connection of the sorts that they couldn't, let's say... let by the rules unpunished.

I didn't meant to sulk, after all one of the most crucial parts in my plan was to avoid Ryan perceiving me as some spoiled brat, even if that was all I was. Still, my bottom lip pushed outward of its own volition, so I took another drag to keep the pouting at bay.

Something fizzed to my right: Ryan opening a can of soda. The fluid dripped down his fingers and onto mine when he handed it over. “I don't want you crashing in the sun from low blood sugar. Here.”

Even if I easily survived in this weather, I appreciated the gesture and greedily chugged half the can. I was thirstier than I cared to admit, though it must have been evident when the soda rose up through my esophagus and threatened to trespass into my nose before I repressed a burp. I wasn't with the guys, and Ryan looked nothing like the type to engage in belching contests.

I shrugged off my blazer and folded it as a makeshift seat like the brocade pillow he had dragged out there and enthroned upon, ruling the lawn and the school behind them with his sunglasses and refusal to participate in their constitutional mealtimes. I unbuttoned my shirt as well and resisted self-consciously rubbing the faint razor rash. After all my skipped lunches, my stomach had sunk and created a valley between my hipbones. I didn't exactly have a six pack to allure Ryan; I didn't know if he liked skinny boys and I should just put the shirt back on, but the sun roared above the parasol and speared right through the fabric of my slacks. Like the rest of the students, I disdained Saint Franklin's suffocating choice of woolen uniform, so I scooted a little farther under the parasol and closer to Ryan, whose bare arms stuck out from the armholes in his tank top. Covered by his shirts you'd think they looked closer to scrawny chicken bones or something equally un-sexy, but up close they had the lithe quality of a professional dancer, suntanned skin stretching over a flexed biceps as he rearranged the stubborn parasol. I never cared for dancing, but my brain suggested the kind of dance where his arms pegged me to somewhere flat, maybe even the grass underneath us in that very moment, possible on-lookers be damned.

I wrapped my fingers around the enticing biceps, and before I could stop myself I had blabbed “do you work out?”

Though he sat under a parasol, Ryan sported some ridiculous grandfather trilby and those decades old sunglasses. The glasses had slid down his nose from sweat, and he looked at me from above them, skeptic or amused – or god forbid it, condemning – so I estimated I went too far with the flirting and reluctantly removed my hand from his arm.

“I mean, _where_ do you work out, because I've never seen you in the gym.” There, fixed it. Our knees still bumped at each other, sticky with sweat and some kind of sunscreen next to his cooler filled with of soda cans. 

I only visited the gym hall of the school when forced to. If alone on weekends, the room I occupied almost as much as me and Spencer's dorm room was the old instrument-storage room from the extinct music classes Saint Franklin's used to teach in the nineties, but after Ryan's arrival I had little spare time for either.

Ryan said “I do pilates. Alone. In my living room, if you can call the cupboard I live in that.”

I replied, too smart and too soon, “Pilates? Isn't that a girl sport? Like yoga?”

“You play soccer, right? That's a boy sport.” He pushed the insult in place along with his sunglasses. They completely shielded his eyes, but he was studying me behind them, and it made me self-conscious about my stomach and my sweaty uniform shirt and the way my heart threatened to pound a hole in my chest.

A cloud shielded the sun just as an equally bright smile emerged on Ryan's face. “Pilates is for people who don't want to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” he said. 

Maybe he did like the thing with the hipbones then, because his eyes burned like that sun everywhere on my body: my lips, the ladybug that crawled into my navel, the zipper in my pants, but instead of scorching, it just tickled.

He wet his lips, and I subconsciously mirrored the action. I leaned a little closer, little closer, until I could count the shades of pink and discern his tongue wetting the pearl teeth and the soft noise he might emit if I slipped my own between them, his bare arms forcing me to the ground, the heatwave pulsing through my blood-stream

“You really should go and get some lunch,” Ryan said,  
inches and  
feet and yards and light years away from me.

“Yeah,” I breathed, though I didn't need anything but the bubbling feeling in my stomach. I had no idea if it stemmed from the soda or his eyes glued to my mouth. If we sat that close on the grass any longer, I feared the tension would erupt and burst out from every fiber in my body, have me tackling Ryan and hammer him into the dirt with my own body.

If a moment had been there, by then it had passed like the cloud in front of the sun.

.

### 

.

When I returned to my room, I received a letter. Well, in truth I received five letters, and headmaster Daniels delivered them himself, grumbling about all the burdens on his desk now that everyone was on vacation. Not like he had a family of his own, apart from all his liquor bottles and the portraits of the deceased headmasters. Still more than I had, me alone in my room without Spencer.

“Here you go,” he said and dumped the papers on my blanket, on top of my dog-eared magazine, with a hitherto never-seen smirk, which contorted his face so he looked like some sort of freaky demon mask. “Happy reading.”

I already knew, as soon as I read the return address on the first one.

Here's what Dartmouth had to say:  
 _Dear Mr. Urie_  
We are sorry to inform you that your application to study at our college has been rejected  
followed by choruses of Bowdoin clarifying their sorrow over their declination of me and my money, especially since they were able to accept my sister and her A plus grades.  
 _Princeton, unfortunately, informs you that it is not possible to offer you admission to the class of..._  
...with deep regrets, University of California is unable to offer you admission to the freshman class...  
we are unable to consider appeals to this decision  
Yale, last hope oh-dear-lord-just-put-me-down-gently Yale, said if I felt I could change their mind, I should arrange a meeting with my parents, as if that would help.  
 _We're sorry we cannot accept you_  
terribly sorry  
with our deepest and most kind-hearted words we reject you into the cold with no place to study after summer, you and your ape-shit good-for-nothing brain.  
The only thing we regret is the tuition-money your parents now regrettably have to spend on a new sports car or a renovation of the pool so your mother can have intercourse with the pool boy.

I had expected nothing more or nothing less from any of them, but my reaction surprised me; I was covered in torn up envelopes and ripped pages from my magazine, so old and shabby that they fell off when I hurled it at the door, screaming “fuck you Yale” as if any of the colleges ever deserved my anger.

.

### 

.

I skipped dinner, cowering under my blanket like some frightened rabbit and without Spencer or Pete there to rip it off me and yell “come eat, you butt-wipe” or something equally inspirational and motivating. I'm not sure I would have gone with them, to be honest.

Hungry and stupid, confused about whether to eat and wanting to bury myself in my bed with my iPod in my ears, I dragged my body out of bed and visited Ryan. The rejection letters in the inner pocket of my jacket weighed me down and it seemed forever before I stepped in front of his annex. My knuckles brushed over the polished wood several times before the door opened. There stood Ryan, in shorts and a t-shirt with a towel across his shoulder; at eight in the evening; frown on his face and a bottle of water in his hand.

“They rejected me.”

Before he could ask “who”, I had elaborated: “all of them.”

Some kind of mat lay rolled out on the floor, a set of dumbbells next to it, an old portable cd player with straightened earphones next to that. I followed him past the items to the couch, and he motioned for me to sit on something. Seeing as the water bottle already occupied his lap, I chose the cushion next to him.

“What happened?”

I shrugged out of the jacket and found the letters, all five of them. “This happened,” I said and poured all my rejections in his lap. The evidence of my stupidity scattered all over his thighs and the floor. He gathered the Dartmouth one. Biting my lips and the tips of my fingers out of sheer nervousness, I watched his forehead crease after each line of reading. His eyes flitted across each page of exclusion; my eyes flitted down the slope of his nose and his lips mouthing the words. After a long silence during which he skimmed the letters and his brow creased further, he put down all of them on the table.

“Have you ever considered taking some extra courses over the summer? If you pass them, you might get into a college.”

“Might,” I repeated, but with a different tone and pressure on the word. “I might as well not try.”

“Don't you want to get in? You sent out all those letters?”

“My parents sent out all those letters,” I corrected him, because while I typed the damned things out, they stood behind me with the big fat money-gun pressed against the back of my neck. Two shadows towering over me saying “we believe in you, Brendon” with well-rehearsed almost oil-slick voices from the time they'd spent polishing them. “I'm pretty useless, huh?”

“No, you're not,” he said quietly. An arm snaked around my shoulder, his fingers paused at my waist and settled there. On purpose, was it on purpose? I leaned closer to him and rested my head on his shoulder. He remained still, four fingertips meeting the lowest of my ribs, talking about those college rejection letters. “But I still think you should write to Yale again, arrange that meeting.”

This was it, the right moment. We faced each other; our legs formed a triangular shape, my head was on his shoulder, inches away from his tempting mouth speaking all those reassuring words.

“I think –” he said, before I went for the spoils. His teeth caught the tip of my tongue mid-talking, and bit into it so harshly, I tasted the blood that welled up in there. We were both frozen for a moment before his hands gripped mine, which were twisted in his shirt, and tugged me in the oppofsite direction. Shoved me away so fiercely, I heard the snap of his wrist-bones; that was probably a more accurate description.

“What are you doing?” he stammered, as if he hoped my action could be written off as an accident, as if I'd meant to kiss the air next to his head. He crabbed away from me until his back hit the arm-rest, and his eyebrows had drawn up in anxiety; below them his gaze skated across my bloody lip.

I called at him from my end of the couch, “what's the matter?”, as blood bubbled out of my mouth from where my tongue had collided with his incisors. The words came out thick like I was on the verge of tears, but I wasn't; I was just pissed. “You don't want me? Come on; the way you stare, you'd be a fucking liar to say you don't want me.”

How could I possibly not notice the way Ryan leered at my legs when he walked past our gym class, at my lips when I spoke in class, never at the floor or Joe next to me anymore. The way he stared a few hours ago.

“I'm your _teacher_ ,” he said, not denying my statement, but not facing me either.

The sofa creaked under my weight as I crawled over to him again. He just sat there with his deer-in-the-headlights expression as my hands slid up his thighs in search for evidence that he wanted me to do so.

“That doesn't mean we can't...” I trailed off. My hands pushed up his shirt, my mouth chased it all the way up to his armpits before he pulled it down again.

“Don't,” he said and pushed me off with brutal, trembling hands and eyes dark from something else than anger, maybe fear, but there was nothing to be afraid of; no fear of rejection until he actually rejected me this physically.

Stupid me, I whispered “but you've been so nice to me” like that meant he wanted to have sex with me.

“You need to leave,” he said, “and don't come back this week or next week or next month. I will grade your essays and I will help you in class, but I'm not – Jesus, how did you even think –”

Infinitely imbecilic me, I just threw myself at him again and silenced those ugly words and that pretty mouth with my own, angry and clumsy and probably crying, because maybe that'd change his mind, yeah right. The cellphone was in my back pocket, the evidence, the cause for me being here, my getaway ticket from this awful school.

But I wanted no such thing that moment; I wanted his nails digging into my neck, skin rupturing, bruises on the inside of my lip until he pushed me off again with wild eyes and the lips I thought so pretty covered in my blood and bite marks, hell, even his chin had an indent of my front teeth.

“I told you _no._ ” He hissed the words at me and pointed to the door with one shaky finger, my DNA still stuck under his nails, his pupils black as he swore “get the hell out.”

So I retreated with a bloody chin and water rising in my eyes, bile rising in my throat, and suddenly the door slammed, leaving behind an unfamiliar silence.

“Go away,” he called. A hand yanked the curtains even closer together, and the click of the lock sounded behind me.

I forgot my three thousand two hundred dollar Yves Saint Laurent leather jacket in there, but the price I had to pay to go back was way higher, so I left with balled fists in my pockets, tears and blood coloring my face and goosebumps rising on my arms and legs.

The sun sank into the horizon, accompanied by mosquitoes and birds laughing at me.

And I had ruined pretty much everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Should I have tagged dubcon warnings for this chapter? Tbh I hate spoiling stuff, but I hope I didn't make any of you too uncomfortable for the sake of a plot. 
> 
> **Bonus:** since Friday is Halloween I have a surprise -- unrelated to this story -- and I'm not sure why I'm telling you this, but for some reason I tend to add chapter notes without truly having anything to say.


	6. Chapter 6

After that incident, Ryan went from just within reach to torturous. I couldn't bear to show up for his classes just to have him stand at the front and ignore me. I didn't know what was worse: him not looking at me or him looking at me with disgust written on his face, have me recall his rejection.

Better to not show up at all, I concluded.

The first double English lesson on Monday morning, I overslept.

I ditched the late English lesson on Tuesday in favor of occupying the instrument room. No one had used it since the late nineties when the popularity of creative classes died out due to the excess of homework in the regular ones. Occasionally the school board auctioned some of the instruments. Most popular were the pianos and guitars, but there was a scrawny acoustic one with a broken string left. Whenever anyone used it, we hid it behind the shelves of ukuleles, so the board never discovered it. Here I sat for a few hours, between tubas and tambourines, in a room that was never locked and rarely used. Some of the freshmen might not even realize its existence. I let the melodies absorb me, and for a blissful ninety minutes I forgot about Ryan.

Spencer asked me where I had been since I hadn't shown my face in English class or at dinner.

“I swear, the jacket potatoes were the size of footballs – are you sick?”

“Yeah, sick of Mr. Ross yapping about Hemingway.”

He rewarded me with a high five. “Good one,” he said, even though he claimed _A Farewell To Arms_ was the best book we had read all year. With the elegance of a calving cow, he tipped back with his laptop, settling into his bed for writing a chemistry report I had paid off Ian to finish for me two days ago.

Wednesday, thankfully, we had no English classes, but when I entered the dining hall and its mouthwatering stations of paninis, pasta and potatoes (which were roughly the size of an inflated tennis ball), something caused me to turn right around and stride away as quickly and unnoticed as possible.

There, at the humanitarian teacher table sat no one but Mr. Carden and Ryan, who laughed about something in a textbook. Well, Mr. Carden supplied most of the laughter and Ryan was only smiling. He kept glanceing around the room, at the paper airplanes departing from Gabe's table and the juniors who hurled peas at Mr. Carden's neck. The vegetables missed their target, but a small pile of green orbs had collected on Ryan's tray of mashed potatoes and an indistinguishable stew.

My lungs constricted at the vision, competing with my hungry stomach in turns of violent spasms. I couldn't go in there and have him look up from his lunch and see the smile on his face falter, I just could not physically force myself to do it.

I went to the music room again where a class of sophomores threw me out, then I went to the deserted gym and ate all of Spencer's mini Bounty bars.

Thursday I skipped breakfast as well as lunch, not to mention all my classes for the day, so my English Lit-only absence attracted less attention. I grew hungrier and hungrier and Spencer had locked up his candy along with the freshly acquired pills and powders. A dash to the grocery store one hour before curfew saved my ass, and I spent my night eating dry Ramen noodles and protein bars under my blanket.

Granted, rather late, I had the revelation that my sneaking around and skipping every English class and every meal could not go on for the rest of the school year. And it wasn't like I had planned on staying anyway; the whole point of me getting into Ryan's pants was closure, escapism, putting an end to all this scholastic misery.

So Friday I loaded my suitcase with necessities and readied myself for the earliest train departure Saturday morning. I spent the time I should have been in class writing a goodbye letter, because I didn't have time to actually say it to anyone, not to mention that they might stop me. It wasn't the departure I wanted: the big-scale dramatic exodus with confetti and tears, fights and expulsion, not to mention the headlines about my degenerated affair that would bring down my dad and his election campaign.

In the middle of our messy room – soon to be Spencer's messy room – I stood with shirts and jackets all over the place. Last night I had hurled the near-empty noodle containers at the floor when the hall guard came, so he wouldn't hear me munching under my blanket, and the remains had ended up in the bottom of my trolley where little yellow curls could still be found between the intricate wickerwork.

I considered sneaking off to Annex G to conquer back my jacket, but the fear of Ryan's presence – even though he was busy teaching senior students the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis – held me back for quite some time. Eventually I concluded that the damned thing had cost me several thousand dollars and he didn't deserve it. If he even still had it; maybe he'd thrown it out because it smelled like me and he despised me so much he couldn't bear to return it; maybe he'd burned it on a pyre; maybe he'd burned it with Mr. Carden and told him all about my repugnant sexual advances. Maybe they'd laughed about it together and watched my jacket blaze and fly into the evening air in a bazillion tiny pieces of ash.

I was ready to press down the door handle, when something slammed the whole door in my face and forcefully drove me into the wall behind it. There I was, squashed between the door and the wall. I was sure my nose had broken, because it felt like heated rubber and something warm trickled down my lips, and then I couldn't feel it at all.

“Brendon? Are you – oh god, I'm so sorry.”

Ryan's voice surged into my ears from where it somehow trespassed into my veins and froze like slush, my whole body suddenly cold and rigid. _Don't answer, don't answer, don't answer,_ but I did answer with a timid groan and a wet sneeze. Thick blood sprayed on the door and speckled part of the polished oak ruby.

“I didn't see you there.” He peeled the door off me, or rather me off the door. His stupid fingers stroked my neck, so I forced them off and forced him off, too. It meant nothing; he was just plain kind. He asked if I was okay again.

“No, you fuck, you broke my nose,” I sneered and wiped the blood from my face. He handed me a tissue, something which he always seemed to carry with him.

“Did I?” Without asking for permission, he reached out to fondle the bridge of my nose, nudging the cartilage in place. It felt like someone tugged on my face with a bolt cutter and I wheezed at the hurt. But as he daubed a drop of blood from my nostril, I felt no more pain, just a wet sort of numbness between my nostrils. “There,” he said. “All fixed.”

“Thanks.” I rolled my eyes and ignored his ever-present concern. “Did you come here just to smash my face?”

At this, he shook his head and gestured toward the bed, still filled with crumbs, in a 'can I sit down for a serious conversation with you that neither of us want to have' manner. I let him – after all he had fixed my nose, so I owed him this much – then sat down myself.

“You haven't been to class all week,” he began. How observant of him. Then he noticed my gaping suitcases and the textbooks placed in a neat pile with the goodbye note on top of them. “Are you leaving? Because of m... what happened, is that why?”

“Don't be so vain.” I had to urge sarcasm into my voice. This was magnificent. Just peachy, splendid, stunning, superb, real fucking awesome. In under five minutes he'd managed to break my nose, my escape plan and my self-esteem in one suave motion.

“Don't be so selfish,” he retorted, in a much angrier tone than before. At first I thought I heard him wrong, because I'd predicted anything but _that_ , but no, he continued: “You're acting like a martyr, oh no, look at me, poor Brendon, my parents pay thirty grand for my private school tuition, and my teacher does the only respectable thing any sane person would and turns me down, why doesn't everyone cater to me and my needs only.”

Before I could stop him, he reeled on, going “why can't my jackets be calfskin leather instead of lamb, why is the whole school system out to get me by forcing me to learn something, I just don't understand why I can't lie around and receive money for that, why can't I kiss my teacher like I would any other person my own age –”

In his next breath, he abandoned his poor imitation of my tone and mannerisms for a hushed “you're terrible,” his voice abrupt and low, though perfectly clear in its proximity to my ear. His hands wrapped around my shoulders and shoved me back against the wall until my lower back balanced on the bed frame. “I'm terrible and I want to do terrible things to you.”

In distant parts of the campus, soccer games and dares unraveled. Students bruised, dirty hands exchanged cold parental cash, Spencer counted money for summer and his east coast college adventures, and everyone acted like the adults they weren't. I felt light years away from them, but I didn't know in which direction.

Vaguely, I heard their hollers below before my skull knocked against a photograph of the '88 senior class and Ryan's lips knocked against mine, inviting himself into my mouth. It was nothing like in my imagination where I sat enthroned on top of him and orchestrated the whole thing. This was my sore nose squished into my cheek, his tongue tracing the ridges of my teeth and tickling the translucent line where wet and dry lip met. It tickled so much, I would have laughed if I had enough air or enough brain capacity to form a coherent emotion except for surprise.

I braced my hands on either side of myself. He tangled one of his in my hair and another in the collar of my t-shirt. My legs folded themselves into an unwieldy crossed position while he crawled closer to me on the bed, only then retiring his tongue from my mouth.

After a few millimeters of retreat, he grit out “god, you're selfish,” before he delved in again with less fervor. His stubble scratched and burned my chin. The blood began trickling from my nose again as his hand caressed my neck. My mouth filled with the saliva of two people and my head buzzed with electric butterflies, and between those small nibs on my bottom lip he managed a meek “you're a stubborn, selfish, spoiled brat.”

The insults scarcely stung my sense of pride, occupied as I was with his contradictory actions, but then he finally curbed his tongue and used it solely to kiss me. His hand was no longer tearing out strands of hair; instead it cupped my face from jaw to temple. The other flattened the crumpled fabric of my t-shirt; smoothed across my collar bone and over my shoulder; delivered my shoulder blade from the cement wall.

Like all kisses, like all events and all life on this earth, it ended, and we were left sitting in me and Spencer's musty room that smelled of spicy shrimp noodle powder and sweat and unwashed teenage boy.

So now he'd kissed me, and with one small action revived all my hopes of success along with something else, an undetermined yearning that I wasn't sure how to place, you know, physiologically speaking, because it traveled through my body at the speed of light. This emotion-truck pummeled over my internal organs, pit-stopped at my lungs for snacks, then my windpipe and the back of my brain blaring its horn of hey, your teacher kissed you, he fucking kissed you, it happened and he initiated it before it drove straight south after it had tanked up on the concept that he might kiss me again.

“Uh,” he said, and I bit back a “poetic” because his actions obviously distressed him to the point of muteness. “I shouldn't have done that. I shouldn't have; that wasn't right.”

“But you did,” I said. What I had imagined was this: I would smirk and ask if it felt good; how long had he wanted to do it? Instead this happened: his hands slipped to my waist with weary movements, and I couldn't decipher them resting there as threat or affection, but when he finally removed them I missed the pressure.

“You can never tell anyone about this,” he said, grave and pale at the sight of me with his spittle smeared across my lips and cheeks as pink as my sister's homemade blanket on the bed.

Then, softly: “you're bleeding again,” before he dabbed away the fresh blood on my lip. “I have to go. You can't leave in the meantime, okay? Unpack those suitcases.”

“What the fuck is wrong with you,” I called after him, “Stay and talk about it for fuck's sake. I'm just gonna leave, yeah, I'll jump right on that fucking train tomorrow morning unless you explain –”

but he had already slammed the door to my room behind him and left me alone. In a compact mirror, which, by the way, is not a girly thing to own, I checked my reflection to see how much blood was really on my nose. An eighth of my face stared back at me, chalk-dust fingerprints visible in my hair and my mouth slightly agape and glistening like strawberry jello.

 

...

 

I still needed to leave, though, that was crucial. Ryan's behavior had changed nothing about my desire to board that train Saturday morning, in fact it only spurred me on and convinced me that Saint Franklin's was poisonous; it was slowly and tortuously strangling me with every second I spent inside another room where Persian rugs covered the floors and desperation dripped from the ceiling in big, fat globs.

I pushed my suitcases under my bed, so they remained concealed from Spencer, and then I went down to the tennis court where William and Pete waited.

“Ready for us to kick your ass?” Pete yelled. He tripped on the balls of his feet in his sullied sneakers, and his head barely reached the top line of the net. Next to him stood William, who was dressed in one of those white tennis outfits completed by a sweat-soaking headband which peaked above the top line of the net, keeping in place his brown tresses. In his hand swung a tennis racket, one of the fancy ones with a handle that had not yet been picked apart by some impatient sophomore. His parents bought him tennis rackets and squash rackets and shoes for every sport he ever played, even if it was only once.

“Oh please, I can take down both of you with my eyes closed.” The jab came out perfect, per reflex, but I wasn't really there with them, baked by the sun with the blue hardcourt under my feet. This could be, no it was, my last tennis match with either of them, with anyone, and I should enjoy it, but my thoughts circled around the carcass of the afternoon like scavengers, picking apart the meat on any of Ryan's actions to see if an ulterior motive might be hidden under there.

Of course there was; no one behaved that way without ulterior motives, but what, what did he want when he attacked me like – a tennis ball smashed the side of my head and knocked me to the ground, my tennis racket hitting me in the knee. I tasted blood from my nose and gravel from where my tongue was pressed into the shoe-print of someone else.

“What did you say? I can't hear you over the sound of your _lo_ -sing,” William shouted.

Yelling back at him, “I did that on purpose,” I ignored the throbbing aches in my temple and leg, along with the blurry spots behind my lids whenever I closed my eyes, the strangely Ryan-shaped spots. I scraped the gravel off my tongue and inspected my grazed-up knees.

“I can still play,” I said, so we did, but when I missed another four balls, Pete declared me the loser of, not only the tennis match, but the whole school-year and my entire life.

“You can't play for shit, Urie,” he cheered. He dashed across the court and hurled his racket in the provided bin. William followed with more leisure. He still swung his tennis racket, its aluminum shaft glinting in the afternoon sun.

I didn't bother to place my borrowed racket in the bin and cast it to the ground next to it instead.

“Whatever,” said William upon notice of my misdemeanour. “It's not like it'll rain.”

 

...

 

The following morning a terrible clattering woke me. It differed from the usual raccoons and birds outside by consisting primarily of human voices, arguing. About me.

“Out,” the first voice said. It sounded like Ryan. Squinting through my lashes and remaining very still, I detected him outside our room. Spencer stood on the opposite side with his arms crossed and a foot in the door. He tried to look stern, but his cartoon pajamas along with what I guessed was curiosity as to why our teacher banged on our door a whole hour before the kitchen first served breakfast canceled the authority the wished to assume.

“Can't that wait? It's seven in the morning. On a Saturday.”

“This is important. You'll have to wait outside,” said Ryan. Even I, in my hazy post-woken state, sensed the acidic urgency. “Sorry,” he added, softer, but strode past Spencer and into our room. Behind the closed door Spencer shouted about how unfair it was, which was true, but my curiosity to know what Ryan wanted this early far outweighed our friendship.

Somewhere in the room Ryan asked if I was sleeping, but his body was only a blurry shape in my peripheral vision.

I feigned sleep for a minute more so I could revel in his hand gently squeezing my shoulder. Once, twice, four times, until he stopped nudging me kindly and resorted to pinching the skin on my knee, which was still grazed and now resumed its bleeding.

Instinctively I hissed at him and curled up in my blanket like a hedgehog protecting its weak belly. My knees were drawn up under my chin and the blanket locked in my fists, but somehow Ryan managed to coax it from me.

“We need to talk.”

He squatted next to the bed so he was at eye-level with me, still holding onto my blanket. While at first I considered yanking it out of his grip and go back to sleep, I decided not to.

“So first you don't want me, then you do, and now you want to talk about it? Is that correct? Can you get to the point soon?”

“Apparently I'm easy to corrupt,” he said.

A spider wandered across the wall next to me, one of those really gross ones with a body the shape of a cockroach and two-inch legs. I studied its path as he spoke.

“But I wanted to make sure you don't leave”. The scratchy sound of my suitcase being dragged across the floorboards underneath my bed startled me away from the spider. Ryan held up a bag. At that moment it was fully packed and ready to bumble behind me as I fled the school grounds at eight in the morning while everyone else still snoozed in their beds, but he unzipped it so toothbrush, shampoo and my most valuable clothes spilled onto the floor. “Which you evidently planned to do.”

The nerve of some people. Who the hell did he think he was? Like Daniels' vintage champagne, indignation bubbled up inside and out of my mouth in a sardonic “oh, you kissing me yesterday was supposed to make me stay? Because you were so explicit about your intentions.”

Ryan's eyes averted mine and swept over the floor, which was much cleaner than last time he was in here. “Well,” he mumbled. Then, “Don't throw away your education because I don't know how to tell you 'no' properly. I'm sorry, it was my mistake.”

How humble he acted all of a sudden. It was actually kind of endearing, had he not been an adult. In reality, just like he said, it was pathetic that he couldn't control himself. Or at least have surrendered to me the first time so we weren't stuck in this mess: his hands twitching on my bed, my hands twitching to hold one, Spencer outside yelling “Let me in you fuckers, I need my toothbrush.”

“What now?” I asked.

“Please don't report me,” he said. His fingers twisted in my sheet, and, evidently exhausted from squatting, he let himself dump on the floor. He folded his legs under my bed, and turned so his elbows rested on it. There was a grave urgency etched in his features I had rarely seen on anyone outside of, well, Sharp's funeral. “You're angry, and I shouldn't have kissed you, okay, but can you please not tell the headmaster? Or anyone else for that matter.”

This was something entirely different from last night and his commands, his “don't tell anyone, or else”. Or else what? He'd never kiss me again?

“What's in it for me? I don't want to stay here.”

“You can't leave; you have less than four months left of high school,” he argued, which was true. Four excruciating months, each day more tiresome than the previous and every single one of them littered with tests and SAT scores, all of which only led to a summer full of extracurricular courses if I wanted any of those pretentious colleges to accept me.

“Don't throw all of that away because I couldn't control myself,” he said again.

I frowned. “What do you mean? I started it.”

Him: “so what are we going to do now? Just stroll around for four months and pretend that everything's wonderful?”

Outside the door Spencer had quieted, or maybe he'd gone to take a shower. I hoped the latter was the case, because if he heard what I was about to say then, he might suffer a minor stroke.

The idea was ridiculously simple. Before I could stop the words from rolling off my tongue, I had already said “what if everything was? They don't have to know” and even worse, I had already craned my neck forward enough that it couldn't be passed off as mere stretching.

Ryan remained still, bowed over the mattress and studying his interlaced fingers, ignoring me and my advances. “I can't do that.”

“Why not? You obviously want to.” My neck was starting to hurt and so were my eyes from attempting to drill a hole in his skull and unlock whatever thoughts that pained him. He kept chewing on his lip, over and over; he wet it with his tongue, dragged his teeth across it, caught the small flecks of chapped skin and peeled them off.

Outside the horn of the food delivery trucks blared. Someone screamed at the driver that the food gate was at the other end of the school, there was no reply, and Ryan picked at the skin around his nails.

My elbow itched and my neck felt like it was locked in a permanent giraffe position.

The movement of his head could be passed off as a nod, but I had no time to reflect on it because the answer showed up inside my head, a million loose ends coming together and exploding in gilded fireworks of complete and utter clarity.

My voice trembled a little when I asked, I mean, it was sort of an intimate question.

“That's why they fired you, wasn't it? You slept with a student.”

His fingers stopped picking, frozen in their claw position and his face changed, contorted, for a split second before it resumed its dazed expression, and he stared blankly into the space behind my head.

“No, I don't want to talk about that,” he said, faint as if he hadn't really heard my question.

But I was right. For once in my life I had answered a question correctly without cheating or being asked, and it far outweighed any mathematical solution in terms of importance. My head swam with this victory and the need to celebrate it with someone, anyone, anything, but Ryan looked utterly despondent and far from ready to open up about it.

“Okay,” I said and closed the distance. Painfully aware I had not brushed my teeth for a couple of days, and my mouth probably still reeked of noodle chicken and veggie powder, my lips brushed against his. Nothing happened, no fireworks, we were just locked in a strange position with my head hanging off the bed and his in a forty degree angle to meet mine.

Honestly, everything tasted like onions. His breath through his nose hit my cheek, first soft then hitching when I brought my hand to touch his neck for reassurance that he was really there, it wasn't some dream, and he wouldn't punch me by the time he realized how wrong this was.

The horn blared again, alerting the entire school that the food truck came back with more groceries. A woman's voice apologized for rotten cabbage and Ryan had closed his eyes, now leaning against the bed frame.

Someone yelled “I need two more dozen pounds of yams,” while my tongue pried apart his chapped lips and yielded, responded, surrendered.

Another someone delivered those yams, but it must have taken them far longer than necessary, because Ryan looked a few years older when I finished the kiss.

“I should go to lunch,” I said. “I've been living off of protein bars for the past week.”

“You can't tell anyone,” he repeated. “And you can't try to desert the school in the middle of the night, you have to stay and take your SATs and receive your graduation diploma.”

Look at him trying to bargain with me.

Look at him with disheveled hair and swollen lips, on his knees in front of my bed. As I shifted on the mattress, my hip bumped against my cellphone and reminded me of the power the small electronic device held.

“And what do I get in return?” With different eyes – say, the ones stuck in the raisin-face of Levi Daniels – his position seemed exactly the kind of evidence that could get me thrown out, but it also looked like something I wanted to experience before that event occurred, so I left the phone alone and reached out my hand to shake his.

Finally raising his head, he brushed away his bangs and cast a glance at me. He looked at the wall, then at the door as he raised himself from my dusty floor, leaving behind clean ass- and hand-prints in the ocean of dust and food crumbs. “You're not so asinine, you can't figure that out, are you?” He smiled, grimly, seductively, wryly, what the hell did I know but that his brief show of teeth upset more than comforted me. And without shaking my hand, he deserted the room.

 

...

 

Spencer poked me in shoulder so sudden and sharply, my plate slipped in my hands and nearly crashed to the floor in dozens of fancy porcelain shards it was not my job to clean up. “What did Mr. Ross want?”

I'd forgotten to concoct a probable excuse that involved anything but me playing tonsil tennis with our teacher, so to stall him I eloquently said “what?”

He squinted at me with his head tilted toward his shoulder and the pasta station to our left. “When he threw me out to talk you? Did you forget already?”

Some rude demi-god of snooping curiosity had replaced Spencer and his polite “maybe you had a serious conversation you didn't want to talk about in front of the guys,” I was sure of it, but I was friends with this demi-god and all the surrounding seniors, who had no bigger troubles than whether the bolognese or puttanesca would be the least dry, so I had no choice but to answer in my 'Spencer's best friend' voice while I plastered on my 'Spencer's best friend shares everything' kind of smile, the big toothpaste one my mom practiced in front of her mirror.

I could have told him, maybe not here in the canteen, but I could have given him a small wink, a subtle indicator that I would initiate him into the matter later, but then I recalled Ryan kneeling at my bed, hands folded in a what seemed a parody of prayer. The way his eyes flitted away from mine out of fear, his long limbs compressed so that he seemed smaller than me in his tweed blazer and button up shirt.

So right there between Gabe and Pete and fourteen olives and half a can of sardines spilled at my feet, I chose cowardice and the age-old excuse “nothing, just my homework.” For a moment I considered the alternate reality that Spencer had asked about the puttanesca sauce, and I wouldn't resort to lying to the guy I called my best friend. Or the other reality where I wasn't in the canteen at all, but Ryan hadn't convinced me to stay. In this alternate reality I boarded a train to Phoenix or a plane to Los Angeles, and I wore sunglasses so no one at the airport recognized me and reported a missing child to the authorities. These alternate realities consumed me until Spencer snapped his fingers in front of my face.

“And that couldn't wait until noon?”

I ignored him, and through freshmen and their soft serve desserts and peanut butter sandwiches we shoved and stepped on unguarded toes until we reached the safety of our Alpha Pack table. Spencer poked me again mid meal and said “if you don't wanna talk now, just say so. But I want to know.”

In my head I confessed everything: starting at how hard the surprise hit me when Ryan's hands first gripped my head and pushed me back against the wall, from every embarrassingly intimate detail about how I locked myself in the abandoned gym hall showers just so I could jack off to the memory in peace, down to the fact that it was two hours since I had last kissed Ryan and it tore me apart how much I wanted to do it again.

Of course I shut up about it.

Instead I broke off a piece of bread and said “I've neglected handing in some homework, he was pissed and wanted to scold me at ungodly hours.”

Spencer shoved in a forkful of spaghetti, but during the meal he scrutinized my every move like he expected me to tell the truth in the middle of our lunch. I launched into the surrounding conversation about which razors were better for angling that spot behind your jaw.

Someone, I couldn't tell who, said “no, dude, I'm telling you, you can easily use Parker's, at least while you're at school and it might get stolen. There's no use dragging seventy dollar razors with you here.”

“I'd never steal someone's razor,” Patrick said. “At least go for an aftershave or cologne, or someone's wallet. Not that you should do that either, I'm just saying it would be a more obvious choice.”

 _When did Patrick get here?_ I looked down at my plate and half of it was gone, yet I couldn't recall eating any of it.

“Takes a thief to catch a thief,” said Pete, pointing his fork across the table at Patrick.

“Please,” William dismissed, waving his hand. “If you slack on quality, you might as well be shaving with flint. I mean, I never travel anywhere without my Acqua Di Parma Collezione razor. Everything else is... how should I put it without sounding like a pretentious ass? Mediocre, that's the word.”

“Hah! You can't even grow a beard,” Gabe shouted. He'd riled himself up so much, he had yet to discover that the thing he was waving was in fact not a knife or something to back up his ego, but instead half a garlic flute, where the butter dribbled down his hand. “You have no opinion on this. Sorry, amigo.”

William huffed and returned to his pasta. The rest of the group turned toward Joe, who was the only one of us where stubble grazed his jawline in a way that didn't look like he'd glued someone else's pubes to his face.

“I think store brand razors work just fine,” he responded with a shrug. “Besides, a beard makes you look like a real man. If I didn't know any of you, I'd confuse you for sophomores.”

I stopped listening to him, because in between the double doors of the dining room came Ryan. It was only the second time I'd seen him in there, and my already meek appetite diminished rapidly. He didn't look at me or the rest of our table, just strolled up to fix a sandwich and then back to sit with Mr. Carden. He'd changed clothes and was nervously chuckling at something Mr. Carden said, kept looking around and picking at the buttons of his shirt, but never did he look at me, so for several minutes I just stared in their general direction.

Spencer pulled me back to reality with a nudge on the arm. “Brendon? Aren't you gonna reply to that?”

I had no idea who had said what or if we were still talking about razors. The jests ceased when I didn't counterstrike this supposedly devastating offense, and between the six of us who remained at the table, there was an almost audible silence; it hung in the air like a storm cloud above our heads and crackled with unspoken embarrassment on behalf of someone, but whether that someone was myself or whoever took a swing at me, I couldn't tell.

“That was such a low-brain 'insult'” – my fingers formed quotation marks in the air, still grasping my utensils, which nearly poked out William's right eye – “I won't dignify it with an answer.”

After a good-natured but unnatural laughter, we returned to the sad remains of our lunches. I stuffed myself with datterino tomatoes and handpicked kalamata olives resting on whatever the hell mozzarella de buffala was, but I tasted none of it because Ryan still occupied my mouth and every other part of my being.

When I looked back at their table, only Mr. Carden was there, finishing off an ice cream cone.

 

...

 

Spencer didn't ask me about Ryan again. He either forgot or decided to push away his curiosity in favor of writing a history essay for the Tuesday lesson.

During the first class the following week, Ryan scratched things on the blackboard until he broke the chalk and a nail in the attempt, cursing and not until then realizing he was in a classroom full of students. Maybe it was nerves.

One, two, three, six, eight, eleven broken pieces of chalk were in the chalk line below the blackboard. His fingers twitched and he wiped his palms on those ridiculous corduroy pants of his, which seemed tighter than the last time he wore them. Boarding school cuisine finally getting to him like it did the rest of us? My eyes wandered along the pinstripes on the fabric and settled at the belt. He really didn't have much of an ass, if he would just stop scribbling on the board and turn around...

An irritated voice snapped me out of my daze. “Urie, your attention span in class is shorter than the assignments you hand in. Please turn toward the board and take notes like your classmates.”

The blush spread like wildfire on my cheeks. Ryan, satisfied, turned toward the blackboard again.

I bent my head over my single sheet of paper and took notes like the rest of them, ignoring the snickering to my left. Twenty three people gloated at me, condemning, despite that they had never before had problems with my performance (or lack thereof). Until now, where people actually liked the teacher – why wouldn't they? He was better than any of the other asshole we'd had – and I was the only left that Ryan scolded on a daily basis. Still, none of his previous jabs had been quite so sharp and precise.

Maybe some people have a certain radar that alerts them when someone stares at their backside for a prolonged period of time.

When I turned my head to the back of the class, Spencer wore a subtle smirk beneath his headphones and his hands fleeted across each sheet of paper. When I refocused on the blackboard, Ryan had un-tucked his shirt so it hung a good deal below the hem of his pinstriped vest.

I kind of wanted to spin around in my chair and exclaim the events of Saturday morning to the lot of them, you know, to let them know I actually was the one he liked the best of all. Then again, what proof did I have? Three extraordinarily confusing kisses and a hundred stinging insults about my intelligence and capability of focusing on anything any teacher said to me.

Before leaving class I left a note on his desk, and I completed the action so smoothly, one might consider casting me as the next James Bond, just saying. The note read _study counseling 8pm,_ no question mark, and it looked like any note any of the other students might have received from their tutor, but I knew Ryan saw me place that little stick of yellow paper innocently by his worn-out briefcase.

 

...

 

So we met at eight that night. I showed up at Ryan's door step, unsure of whether or not I should bring roses or a condom. Neither struck me as the better choice, so I just brought the hoard of stomach-butterflies drowning in acid and the fruity alcohol I had downed earlier.

The instant he opened the door, I opened my mouth. “Did we have an agreement or what?”

“Uh... Come inside,” he said and swept out his arm toward his humble habitation.

I continued: “Correct me if I'm wrong, but it went something like I shouldn't ditch this school and then you called me stupid again without explaining a-ny-thing.” I punctuated the syllables for him, each one followed by a gust of peach schnapps breath. I shouldn't have stolen such girly bottles from headmaster Daniels' office back then, but it was all I had left and I was nervous, honestly, about completing that history essay for the following day and sucking his dick and which I had to do first, if any. In a vain attempt to cover my peachy breath, I yawned.

He lead me to the round table in the middle of the room, and sat in his usual chair. Evidence of his constant seating in his particular furniture could be found all over the room: there were balls of tissue at only one side of the foot of the trashcan, pastry crumbs and marks on the carpet from his shoes under the table. Assignments crowded the table-space around it and a book the size of a cement brick lay next to an empty coffee mug. Dozens of coffee cups had etched their mark on that table, and some of the papers too, it seemed, judging from the brown rings on _Romeo and Juliet, a critical essay by Ryland Blackington._

“Are you tired? We can postpone it until tomorrow.” After a pause, he said “did I really call you stupid?”

I took the offered seat and opened the can of Sprite presented to me. I don't know how he conjured all those cans of soda, I mean, you'd think he was allergic to tap water or something. “You called me asinine, and I figured from the context that it meant stupid.”

“Sorry.” Then: “do you have any homework?”

I had two essays and a chemistry report.

“No.”

“That's funny, because Mike says your class has a paper on the Russian revolution due tomorrow.”

“Mike must be lying.”

He sighed and leaned back in the chair. “Brendon, come on. This isn't helping either of us.”

“I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused here, aren't you the one who's supposed to help me with all my difficult homework? Am I, like, supposed to bawl my eyes out into your foul tweed blazer? What is it? Why do you want me to stay so badly? Is it just so you can watch as I fail my assignments?”

I asked him so many questions, I felt like a quiz show game host.

And all he had to say for himself was “I think you should finish your final year of high school, and I'm going to help you do that.”

Another sip of soda. Then another. And another and another until the whole can was gone and my bladder was about to explode because of the water I had for dinner and the diluted peach schnapps I had drunk right before visiting Ryan.

When I returned from the bathroom, I had spilled water on my shirt because his faucet was one of those technical ones that canon-hosed me right in the gut and supersoaked my t-shirt. Ryan had moved himself to the couch and turned on the television. His head craned toward me.

“Did you try to take a shower in there?”

“It's your stupid faucet,” I said.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. From people. When they use it.”

“Do you?”

“Not really,” he said and turned back to the television. I glanced at his fridge and the frozen dinners for one and his line of tableware for one. Then I sat down next to him in the sofa. The television showed some quiz show for bible enthusiasts like the ones in my old neighborhood. Judith and Barney were right then in the middle of a nerve-wracking question about Judas.

The parts of my t-shirts that the faucets hadn't hit were damp with sweat, so I wormed out of it and ignored Ryan shifting away from me. He handed me a blanket and covered my torso with stiff robotic movements. Apparently he would rather risk me having a heat-stroke than sit next to me half-naked. Thanks a lot.

I was sweating like my Aunt Millie on a treadmill so I shrugged off the blanket, and he didn't put it on me again.

The host asked “what was the name of Simon Peter's brother?”

“Aren't they supposed to ask questions like “how much does God love you?” or “what are the three most common causes for damnation?”

(correct answer, listed by degree of severity: gay sex, consuming alcohol, committing murder. How amusing to think that I had participated in all of these in the past six months, whether intentionally or not.)

I debated whether or not to lean on his shoulder and his bare arms, which were at least as sweaty as mine, when his hand just slid from the pillow between us and onto my knee.

Inside the television screen, the audience erupted over Barney's correct answer, and a Hammond organ version of some hymn accompanied their uneven croaks of “hallelujah.”

The host asked what Leviticus 18:22 read, and Ryan's hand trespassed farther up my leg, creating the most annoying yet delicious friction.

Barney said “you must not marry a woman in addition to her sister, to be a rival to her, having sexual relations with the second sister when the first one is alive” as the tips of Ryan's fingers met my zipper and my breath stuttered, trapped in my throat.

With a choked noise, I managed to utter the biggest mood killer since ground zero: “are you hitting on me?” followed by a relieved laughter that sounded way too loud in the small room, and by far suffocated the audience booing at Barney.

Strangely enough, Ryan ignored me and began unzipping my jeans.

Inside the television, the colors showed up all muddled and eighties-like. Judith's already painted cheeks flushed neon with ardor. Maybe it really was an eighties re-run. Her dress looked like it.

Ryan used both hands to pull my jeans down below my hips, below my ass and down my thighs. The audience on the television and I withheld a collective breath. Then Judith's pearl necklace rattled against her voluminous chest as she smashed her fist down on the red button in front of her so hard, I swore it resounded into the living room of Ryan's annex and almost startled him away from me.

“You stay at the school,” Ryan said, though I barely heard him because his head was all the way down there, “we do this, no one knows. That's the deal.”

Judith's mousy voice peeped “thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is an abomination.”

I turned up the volume as the host rewarded Judith with another five points for her correct answer. Ryan's fingers chilled the parts of me they touched, but everywhere else flared up in a feverish want for more.

I stopped watching the show and let my head fall back on the couch. Occasionally an applause sounded from the TV, and I imagined they were all egging him on from in there. All the bible-freaks and cross-bearing Jesus fans saving themselves for marriage to the wrong person.

Ryan hollowed his cheeks and tightened his grip on my hips, muttering something that might have been “sit still,” but I couldn't tell when his mouth was so full and his tongue so slick my brain ceased to function.

The timer on the television showed only four minutes had passed, and I was already squirming and bucking into the relaxed but firm hold he had on me. I probably bruised his throat, flopping about like a hooked fish, but if that was the case he said nothing; just sucked me so good, strangely polite, so different from what I thought would happen, and eternally better.

To make it last longer I imagined my parents were in the television audience too, even though they'd been too busy with my dad's campaign to visit me, let alone church. They could sit there and smile for the camera while my nails raked the shoulders of my English teacher and I looked down at his curls and his spit stuck in my pubes (great, the one time I didn't shave, he decided to go down on me), his mouth swallowing me up like ice cream, inch after inch until his nose squished against my pelvic bone, and I forgot the hall guard outside and the fact that I had to stay quiet.

Simultaneously me and the gameshow host said “oh god,” but whereas he went “praise thee”, I went more like “god, Ryan, fuck.” The host didn't moan quite as much either.

Not in any way correlated, I opened my mouth to tell Ryan he could stop now, that I was close, just as the show jingle played and he seemed perfectly oblivious to my gentle tugs on his hair. By then it was too late. His throat muscles clenched, I froze in the couch for a second and allowed him, then sunk into its backrest.

I muttered an apology and stroked his hair a little. A few of the popcorn on the floor crunched under his knees as he shifted down there, trying to conceal the bulge in his pants. Like he had anything to be ashamed of; like it wasn't insanely flattering how hard he got from blowing me, like I'd ever received it from someone like him.

“So,” said Ryan when he pulled off and away from me, wiping his chin and zipping up my pants. He sat down in the couch and folded his hands in his lap. Nice try. “Do you want me to help you with that history essay?”

Eyeing the clock above the door, then his pants, I licked my lips and assumed my most sultry voice, not that I had any, since I never practiced one. The best I came up with was 'Brendon with A Cold Version 2.0'. “Do you want me to help you with yours?”

Ryan frowned at me. “What?”

I gestured toward his crotch. Any little grasp I had of the situation, anything that might have seemed remotely seductive dissolved into a tame “Your... you want me to?”

“Oh. Oh, I thought you wanted to help me with my essays.”

“I should probably stick to something I'm good at.” I swung off the couch and into the position he had been in only a minute earlier.

I left the annex with no more clarity than I had when I came. In my right hand I clutched a collection of rather lousy notes about the Russian Revolution.

Ryan had said “we should have done this from the beginning” and looked remorseful as he said it, but all I had to do was rub him through his jeans and the remorse poured from his face like on the postcards of Niagara falls that my parents hung on the fridge so it looked like we traveled places together as a family. I got him all riled up again before he shoved a history book into my lap, laughing a little desperately, and forced me to read five pages.

And right after I slipped through the slit of the door to me and Spencer's room as soundlessly as possible, I was supposed to comprise an essay about something that happened centuries ago in Russia, and do so until the early hours of the morning, and then I was supposed to hand in four pages to Mr. Carden after zero hours of sleep, and not fail.

Was it worth it, receiving head from my English teacher?

I decided, yes, it was.

Two hours later, it was less worth it. I sat in my bed on the brink of frustration-tears and had to hold down my own wrist so as not to hit the wall and wake up Spencer from his blissful dreams of another A plus on his report card. My thoughts scattered to every corner of the world; they drifted to Massachusetts and Kara and to Europe and the Italian sunrise and oil-greasy pizza I craved, then toward my parents sleeping like two tin-soldiers in their double bed, with the exact space of twelve inches between them and then I thought about Ryan and his wet, hot mouth, and then I thought what if I only had four fingers on each hand and what if my eyelids closed vertically instead of horizontally and it seemed ten seconds later the sun rose outside and painted the sky a bleary pastel orange.

And I had yet another failed essay between my hands and no sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so today i discovered there is a rich text editor... after all these months i've tried to figure out ao3's html system. dear god. anyway, i officially dubbed this chapter "the jesus blowjob". it was super fun to write. i forget how satisfied i am with this story when it's not monday and i'm supposed to update it. i mean, it feels kind of weird still to be hung up on updating weekly while attempting to write another fic for nanowrimo. i'm just ready to work on something new, y'know?


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> pardon the delay; school stressed me tf out.

Two minutes before my essay was due all my typos and factual errors screamed at me that I needed proof-reading from the biggest history nerd I'd ever known. It wasn't Spencer if that's who you thought; in fact this guy didn't even attend Saint Franklin's anymore, and though I had his cellphone number from when we exchanged them, the last time I texted him was months ago, before The Great Big Incident That Killed My Former English Teacher.

In the dusty history class room, between world maps and encyclopedias and twenty four students sweating bullets over their impending grades, I severely considered pulling out my phone and calling him for some last minute advice.

I could almost hear myself go _“Hey, Jon? I know it's been four months and I've given no explanation whatsoever_ _as to_ _why_ _the_ _plan we spen_ _t_ _half a year constructing fell through, but I really need your help on my history essay.”_

“ _Hey Jon. Are you still alive? Good. Peter Sharp isn't. I need your help with this essay.”_

“ _What's up, dude? Do you still know about the Russian Revolution? Well, awesome, because –”_

“Urie? Do you have your essay?” Mr. Carden towered above me. A tall stack of papers resided on his right arm, and the left he extended toward me. Expectancy adorned his face and the grin on his lips in particular.

“Sure,” I said weakly and handed the three pages with size fourteen and double spacing to him. The smile on his face didn't lessen one bit, and for a moment my heart leaped in my chest at the idea that he knew what happened between me and Ryan the previous night. But that was the whole point, right? For someone to find out, I mean, I wanted sirens and judgment and admonishing and expulsion.

On the other hand I also wanted to kiss Ryan again.

 

...

 

I spent so much time thinking about Jon that day, I nearly suffered a heart-attack when I came into my room and saw someone who wasn't Spencer with brown hair and stubble sitting on Spencer's bed. It turned out to be some kid who was waiting for his bi-weekly supply, but even then it all boiled down to Jon. The mescaline stashed in my tennis shoes and in Spencer's empty cans of soda was his fault and this stranger sitting in my room was Jon's fault and I guess it's time I told you why.

Once upon a time, no, scratch that; this isn't a fairytale, but seriously, once upon a time me and Kara crashed our mom's Lexus. She claimed that she was teaching me how to drive, but I was drunk and someone's pure-breed dog ended up in the hospital with stitches and its owner stopped talking to our family, and around that time my parents concluded that I had wrecked enough havoc upon their spotless porcelain-facade. Of course it wasn't Kara's fault, after all, she hadn't been driving the car, had she? And she was going back to Europe after Christmas break anyway, so there was no point in shipping off _her_ to an ex-religious boarding school which now survived on the donations from parents like mine.

The car-crash and the following arguments and screaming and actual shattered porcelain occurred about fifteen months ago, but who the hell cares; all that matters is that their decision let to me and Jon meeting. And Spencer, of course.

 

...

 

The three of us were inseparable. Imagine the following scenario: you arrive at this pseudo-castle of a building with turrets and wrought iron gates, which looks like it belongs in Great Britain instead of the desert of Arizona, but here you are anyway, at this foreign boarding school in a foreign state because apparently good ol' Nevada just wasn't good enough for your parents to avoid the towering shade of All The Trouble You Bring Into This House, Brendon.

Yes, it began that way, but it's so boring and mundane compared to the year that followed. The instance Levi Daniels shoved me into my room, I met _Smith, Spencer,_ who was also a Junior in class B (out of A, B and C, all of which had twenty four students in each, which totaled to two hundred and eighty eight students. But people kept dropping out for various reasons so that number dwindled rapidly, Spencer informed me without looking up from his laptop).

And two minutes later I met _Walker, Jon,_ who had been to the bathroom while Levi Daniels straightened his mustache and guided me through the school rules, all of which he had printed in a neat little folder for me. I was unsure if everyone received such a folder or if the school had only graced me with such honor because of what my parents must have said. That I was somehow incapable of following simple rules about cleanliness and bedtimes, just because I didn't follow _their_ rules. Although, as soon as something became a rule, it was near impossible for me not to disobey it. The words “you're not allowed” beckoned to me like a neon sign.

Jon, though I didn't know his name at that point, chuckled at my rule-folder and said “you might as well throw it out; none of the teachers care about that anymore.”

“Who's this?” I asked Spencer.

“That's Jon. He's been my room-mate while you weren't here,” said Spencer, as if we were long-lost friends who saw each other after half a circumnavigation of the globe and two college degrees, and had not only met six minutes earlier.

Jon outstretched a hand for me to shake. “I've been sleeping here because my own roommate is intolerable, but at least I only have to put up with him for five more months before I'm free.”

“Jon's a senior.” The voice came from Spencer, whose back curved into a half-loop over the laptop. A few lonely _C_ _heetos_ lay strewn about his position and the keyboard beneath his fingers glistened from their powder. “And he's endured this place for four whole years,” he added, only then looking up at me and pointing his thumb at Jon's back with a solemn face. The longer you had spent rotting up in this place, the more street cred you earned, and this notion only added to the prison-like features of the school, listed right after its wrought iron gates and foot-thick walls.

I turned to my left. My field of view was a crystal-clear sky as blue as the eyes of my new roommate, but it would not have surprised me the slightest if I found bars to be covering the windows.

“So, a senior, huh.” I fiddled with the strap on my backpack. Not knowing what else to say, I went “are you going to college after this?”

“Yep.” Jon nodded and sat down on the dusty mattress of what would soon become my bed. “Stanford history major with a music minor.”

I nodded, too, unsure of how to continue the conversation, and soon Jon left the room, allowing me to unpack my suitcases and Spencer to admire the thousands of dollars invested in their contents (him, holding up my Baume & Mercier against the sun to inspect its authenticity: “is your dad the fucking _president_?” Me, tossing the watch back in its container: “almost”).

 

...

 

Even though Jon no longer lived in our room, he often came to visit, and when he did, Spencer asked me to go outside. I did, and when ten minutes passed and they didn't let me back in, I was tappping my fingers on the door to the bassline of my favorite song that week, then trotting off to Saint Franklin's instrument-room. This continued until the day where only eight minutes passed before they allowed me back inside and said

“we've decided to let you in on something.”

“Cool,” I said, nodding. I expected another one of their tricks, like how Mr. Hall noted your delay as soon as it overstepped his imaginary thirty second-limit, and how Mr. Carden effortlessly estimated if you wrote your essay the night before it was due. Rumor had it that he measured by the bags under your eyes and the amount of caffeinated drinks you gulped in those twelve seconds before class, which you were late for anyway because you had to print your three pages at the same time as everyone else who had overslept the same way you did. And yet, after the school had existed for so many decades, no one had considered printing their papers the night before they were due.

And by the way, the third printer to the right in the copy-room never worked, and hadn't for any of the time neither Jon and Spencer had attended the school.

By the way, never opt for the mozzarella panini. Don't ask why.

By the way, Levi Daniels leaves his office and alcohol supply unguarded every Sunday from ten to eleven thirty while he attends the church sermon. By the way, those vintage bottles in the back? He never drinks from them. By the way, you can easily substitute hundred and eighty dollar per bottle whiskey for apple juice, and the crime will go unnoticed as long as the victim never drinks it.

“By the way, me and Jon deal drugs.”

By the way, the clock in room 21 is thirty two minutes early, just in case you ever think Spanish class drags on forever.

Jon groaned. “Spencer! Do you have to put it so bluntly? Go easy on the kid; he's barely seventeen.”

I sat there, two weeks before my seventeenth birthday, and watched Spencer retrieve two perfectly ordinary plastic bags from the local supermarket. From these he pulled ziplock bags with purple and green lumps; barbie-colored tablets and from the very bottom clinking bottles of tequila, Jack Daniels, Malibu Rum, Grey Goose, Kir, dubiously home-brewed schnapps of a kind. You could easily mistake the powder-content of the smallest ziplock bags for the stuff in the dainty little glass jars my mom put on display for our guests to fool them into thinking it was she, not the maid, who had baked the presented thickly sliced carrot cake decorated with a mountain of cream cheese frosting on top.

“That's a lot,” I said. At that time I had only tried weed, but the abundance of these unnamed substances sent a thrill though me that almost resembled a chemical high.

“It's good business,” said Jon. “But unfortunately I can't keep it up.”

“You have no idea how many of these kids used to pop pills before they came here. You know, snort coke with daddy's credit card,” said Spencer.

Ignoring him, Jon continued: “I know this guy in town.”

“And how does he get all of this?” I asked. “He can't have labs for both coke and ecstasy and ...what's this?” I held up a bag with what looked mostly like granulated sugar. Something rattled the door, and my heart leaped into my throat; at least it felt that way. I spun around in my seated position to make sure no teacher stepped into the mess of coke and granulated whatever and three beer bottles nestled in my lap. A crown cork dug into my thigh, and I dug my nails into my palm to ground myself, as I felt my head was about to sweep aloft and carry my sense with it.

Both Spencer and Jon ignored my panic. The door was locked, no one entered the room without our consent, and soon my pulse slowed to a normal rate.

“Not sure,” said Spencer upon inspecting the sugar-impersonator, “but it's reserved for Travis; he's in our Spanish class. You've met him.”

“Anyway,” said Jon, “no one pays as well as these super rich kids who don't know the market well enough to recognize the good stuff from the bad. We're his gateway into quick money and their gateway into a later drug addiction they'll never escape.”

Weren't we part of that demographic, too, I asked. Jon in return asked me if I did drugs. I said no, while my fingers itched to try one of those periwinkle pills.

“Then you better not start,” he said. “This shit is expensive.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“When I leave, Spencer takes over the whole ordeal, and frankly, we can't keep sending you outside the door every time we need to talk business.”

He looked at Spencer, lifted a single eyebrow and then Spencer turned to me.

“You have to promise you'll never tell anyone about this, okay?”

I nodded eagerly.

“Say it out loud, say you promise to shut the fuck up.”

I promised and Spencer opened his mouth again:

“He's called Tom Conrad. Big shot guy with a lot of connections Jon doesn't even know about. He's out of town a lot, owns a condo up in Flagstaff and a boat and all kinds of shit. I've never met him, don't really know him, but apparently Jon's associate and fuckbuddy here needs a new dealer.”

He looked strange as he said it, like he had a bug or dissected animal in front of him.“Plus, I need to save up for living on my own and paying my loans. I'm not sure if I can get a scholarship, and college costs a ton in case you didn't already know.”

I really didn't. What came to mind was Kara and her year abroad, and her upcoming four years of college, and how my parents payed for everything I didn't even want. Studying Jon, I tried to estimate how rich he was or how much his parents earned, but his clothes had no subtle brand-tags, and looked so ordinary, they might as well have been from, gasp, _The Gap_. And since he only smelled a bit like weed and cinnamon, I couldn't determine anything from his cologne.

“We had this idea.” Spencer rolled a beer bottle between his fingers, so the fluid inside gurgled. The sound bordered on insanity-inducing, but he seemed not to notice. “That I should come live with Jon after I was finished here, and I'd pick a major at Stanford and we'd go to the same college and graduate with one year apart. Then we'd see the world, right?”

He looked up at Jon, who smiled at him, a warm, reassuring kind of smile that clearly wasn't meant for me to observe. In the end I was a third wheel to their friendship; I was an outsider who had only known them for a month. I felt so invisible, I might as well have been a poster on the wall, a dust speck in the air or something miles away.

“And where would you go?” I said, to remind them I was still here. They both turned to me slowly, faces blank, though Spencer's cheeks seemed a shade darker than two minutes earlier.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just want to leave this place, you know?”

“Yeah,” I sighed, because even though I had only stayed at Saint Franklin's Boarding School for Adolescent Boys for four weeks and two days and four hours, I knew all too well what he meant.

 

...

 

Jon and Spencer's plan of traveling together eventually became more than an idea. “Hey, Brendon?” Jon had asked one night, while the three of us shared a joint in the old bell tower in the middle of the night. Spencer had fallen asleep on the stone floor. His head rested right next to the bell, and we would have rung it if a) we had the powers to do so through our haze, and b) the sound would not have alerted the entire school to our presence in the technically off-limits tower. “What are your plans for next year?”

“I guess I just have to suffer through three hundred and sixty five days of Sharp's endless fish jokes,” I sighed. Then what? Nothing. Oblivion. College? Fuck no.

“You should come live with me and Spence.” He handed me the blunt; its tip pulsed orange in the dark. “Stanford's a great place, really, and if you can afford the tuition –”

My laughter cut off further arguments. The sound reverberated in the tower, loud and hysterical, and I must have looked like a madman the way I clutched my stomach, my eyes rolling in my head and my body on the stone floor in curious spasms. Only by some granted higher power did I avoid waking up Spencer by hitting him in the head with my kicking feet. “Oh god, oh god, that's hilarious, man, you're killing me, you're fucking kill–”

In the middle of my sentence, I stopped. Because it wasn't funny that I had nowhere to go in life and after high school. Then again everything was. My entire existence and the fact that Jon had a nose and ten fingers, it was fucking hilarious, so I kept giggling, rolled to a stand, howling at the moon through the spaces between the tower-pillars, howling howling howling.

 

So really, it was all Jon's fault for forcing Spencer and eventually me to stay at the school so we could earn the money to leave and come stay with him. The plan was for us to stay and fork over enough ecstasy to these other super rich kids. They were all younger than us; we were close to the oldest (except for Pete, who had to repeat his freshman year) and still we hadn't left school.

But Jon never talked about the three of us living together since that night. I began to think I had dreamed it all, or even worse, hallucinated from all the pot we smoked. And as I began to grasp at straws that weren't there (things like Jon sending me a text about a local music store where he bought a bass), everything rushed closer and closer. While Spencer's grade went from _Bs_ and _Cs_ to straight _As_ , mine plummeted downward in an avalanche of failure. Every essay I couldn't complete, every assignment I didn't understand, it all piled up on top of head and I needed to get the fuck out before I suffocated.

Cue Jon calling me, not Spencer, which pissed Spencer off so much he didn't talk to me for a whole day. He called in late September and told me the following: “I'm moving to my own, bigger apartment in December, if you still want to come live with me.”

Cue internal screaming and external dancing. Cue eternal joy. Cue instant release from the boredom that was Saint Franklin's. Or, well, release in a few months. But definitely not a whole year like I thought; this was soon and soon it would be now and oh god he hadn't forgotten us; he hadn't forgotten me. His phonecall relieved me so much, my legs gave up like melting chocolate underneath me and I collapsed into my bed.

“You're forcing us to abandon our high school graduation?” I said, half mock-mortified, half actually skeptical, wholly hopeful.

“That's right,” Jon laughed. “I'm forcing you to quit homework and come eat pastries among the portrait-painters in Montmartre and hike to Machu Picchu; I'm a grade A sadist.”

“You know me, I'm all up for it, but I'm not so sure about Spencer, to be honest.”

At the other end, there was a long pause, and the wet sound of something lapping food up; I estimated a pet. “It turns out college isn't all that fun,” Jon said. “And I'll have no money left after I'm done. You have no idea how expensive just one semester is, and I just want to spend them on something that's worthwhile, you know? I just want to make something good with my life. See the world before I get too old and have kids and settle down, is that too much to ask for?”

The Montmartre part appealed to me. I looked down at the granola bar in my hand and imagined it was a croissant and my hand was tan from the places I had been and covered in stamps and festival bracelets. Running my hand through my greasy fourth-day-not-washing-it hair, I almost felt the itch of sand in my scalp, the saltwater roughness of the tresses. In my other hand, the pocket Spanish-English dictionary transformed into my passport right before my eyes, and as I flipped through it, I saw stamps from Japan, from Indonesia, Italy, the icy parts of upper Norway, me with my two best friends river-rafting, flipping through vinyl records in obscure music stores in London, chugging whole gallons, no, bathtubs full of booze because we could, one night in Portugal, the next in Spain because the countries bordered up right next to each other, we could see all of Europe in a week and then move on to Asia, we could go _everywhere._

“What do you say?” said Jon, muffled by the storm on the other line

“I say, it's a done fucking deal.” I was already counting the upcoming stamps in my passports. Only when I hung up the phone did I remember that I forgot to consult Spencer. But he was bound to jump right on the idea, wasn't he? After all he'd spent even longer dreaming about release from the school.

 

When I told him, he didn't take it so well. He tried, I had to give him that, but as soon as I had bounced up on his bed, in a muddle of “jonsayswecanlivetogethernextyearinanewapartment”, something in his face cracked. It was just a tiny vein or nerve, but something twitched or switched off inside his eyes, and he opened his laptop with stiffer movements than usual.

“Yeah, it's gonna be great,” he said, but his smile stretched too wide for it to be real, one of those force-your-lips-upward-and-outward-keep-them-by-your-ears-with-controlled-brutality smiles, the kind of fake smile you only see on people who have never needed one and hence don't know how to forge emotions. “The three of us, super great.”

 

He warmed up to the thought eventually. Through Halloween and Thanksgiving and the whole mess with Kara, he only ever talked about the dwindling number of days left before we headed off to California, the great destination of Jon Fucking Walker and Hell Yeah Cali, Hell Yeah Roadtrip, Fuck You Saint Franklin's, Fuck You Tom Conrad.

Which only meant so much more disappointment when I let him down the way I did.

 

...

 

Everyone who attends a boarding school experience the same sense of dread when their phone rings. All your friends are at school, which means only two people would call you: your parents or the police. Before Sharp's death I used to wish for the latter whenever my phone chimed, but the tenth of April after his funeral was one of those days, too.

I sat exhausted in the middle of me and Spencer's room, with Spencer playing some sort of online game with required headphones in his bed. Clack-clack-curse-clack-curse-clack-clack. I'd already attempted contact with this foreign creature with dead eyes and peanut butter on his chin, but the case was long lost and I was alone with my thoughts, which only amplified the noise of my chiming phone.

“Yes?” I bit back the “what do you want _now_ ” teenager voice, because when she called, it was never to chat about the weather, which by the way was the same in both our states: too hot.

“Oh, hello dear. How are you?” Her voice teetered around the edges of a more important, but apparently so grave question that she had to soften it with trifles first.

How was I? Aside from the fact that I lusted after my English teacher, and said teacher bombarded me during every class because I couldn't keep up with the rest of the students? Tell you what, _mother_ , I was drowning in an ocean of idioms and metaphors and my only life jacket was the after school special featuring Ryan sucking me off and Spencer asking more questions than he did in class.

“Something's come up,” she began. I could hear the rubbery friction when she twirled the phone cord between her powdered fingers, powdered face, everything powdered to conceal the irregularities, whether those were her face, Kara or the rest of our life.

Didn't I know this all along? I slumped down on the floor with my back to the bed.

“We're _so_ sorry that we can't host your eighteenth birthday this week.Your father especially; you know how much he wanted to celebrate this milestone in your life, but the pressure's awfully tight at the moment, and he had to advance the campaign. The camera team couldn't wait another minute, and it's due on TV Thursday, so we really must get it just right the first time.”

Get to the point, mom, just get to the fucking point and hang up on me, will you?

“We just can't have you come home.”

There it was.

I aimed for a sourly pitched tone, I stretched on my toes and reached for the snark, those perfect words that would shrink her down to two inches of apologies, but all that came out was a flat “why?”

More friction on the telephone cord. I half-hoped she electrocuted herself in the motion. “This is too important for mistakes. If anything goes wrong, it wouldn't be fixable.”

“And what would go wrong?”

_You. You you you mess up everything you'll crash a car into your sister's perfect set up lemonade booth or run over a dog and leave your parents with the vet bill, you'll ruin everything by merely existing in the vicinity of that precious million dollar campaign you you you big giant screw-up_

“We'll celebrate next weekend or the one after that!” High-pitched desperation crept into her voice. The line scratched from her twisting and twirling of the cord.

My chest and windpipe tightened as she commenced her parade of excuses. If they wanted my presence so badly, if they wanted to celebrate another year wasted on planet earth, why the fuck didn't they just let me come home, fucking fuck, fuck –

The lump of what I told myself was spite, not sadness, dissolved and I hissed “don't even bother, okay?” before I hurled the phone into the wall next to Spencer's head where it shattered into a dozen plastic and aluminum shards. From a tiny device on the floor came my mother's voice, small and broken: “Brendon? Are you there” before it scratched and faded to its death.

Spencer lifted his headphones an inch away from his ear and asked “parental struggles, huh?” but he sounded far away, as if he spoke from behind a layer of glass. If I could just say “my parents rejected me coming home once again,” maybe we could talk about it, but he wouldn't understand because his parents always wanted him home no matter what their jobs required of them. In fact all week he had blabbered on about how psyched he was to try his friend's new PlayStation.

“Yeah.” I let out an embarrassed laughter, so he would think I'd gotten carried away and destroyed my phone in a fit of teenage hormones. He shook his head and returned to his game, and I returned to my half-packed suitcases and decided to finish packing them, so he would never find out that my weekend-destiny was to stay at Saint Franklin's yet again.

I could go home anyway, wander in front of the camera and screw up my dad's television campaign.

I could pretend I was going home with my suitcases and instead leave the school quietly with no warning whatsoever, but I had no place to stay and no motivation whatsoever, because this always happened. The Urie family must at any cause preserve our popularity in the neighborhood, the state, the country.

 

By now I'd learned that my parents ignored any sign of weakness, discarded the pieces of the puzzle that they, like stubborn kids, could not align their image of the world.

I'd learned it by the last Thanksgiving. Everyone in the house observed the football game unravel in the brand new surround-sound home-cinematic arrangement in the fancier of our living rooms, the one that we used for guests. The room exuded the heat of a dozen gathered family members, and even my mom cheered on when her supported team scored a goal. Meanwhile I climbed out of the backdoor to find Kara, who sat shivering on the porch with a blanket in bunches at her feet. She wore a sequined dress that had slipped from one shoulder and stared at the lights in our driveway as if they might grant her answers for some unspoken question.

“Aren't you coming inside?” I asked. “We could watch some TV in my room while the rest of them finish. There's only thirty minutes left of the game, but I figure it'd be nicer. Kara? Are you okay?”

“It's my own fault,” she whispered. Goosebumps rose on her legs underneath her tights, but still she left the blanket on the ground. She turned to me with eyes so dark and sunken in her face, they resembled pieces of coal, and I jumped in my skin but remained where I was. She looked like a leftover Halloween decoration in her black dress and black circles. Her fingers trembled as she emptied another can of beer and let it rattle down into the pile beside her. “I shouldn't have gone to that party in the first place. Should have kept to myself. They nearly threw me out, did you know?”

“Who threw you out? Mom and dad?”

That's when Aunt Millie stuck out her head and called for me. The steam and smell of roast turkey wafted from the door-opening, which she blocked most of. Some of the light fell on Kara, but I only saw her goosebump-covered legs, not her face and if she wanted me to stay.

“Stop harassing your sister and come help me with the yams.” When I hesitated, she yelled “now, before they get cold”, and with one pitiful look, she closed the door and left my sister out on the porch. In the end I didn't even have to touch any yams; our maid had prepared them in the kitchen.

We all laughed about the Millers' new garden gnomes (my mom: “really, what were they thinking? In this neighborhood? I always thought them too middle-class for us”). Except for Kara. She stabbed at her turkey and tried to catch my eyes across the table, but Aunt Millie's arms, which much resembled the turkey's legs before we cooked it, blocked the view and whatever Kara attempted to communicate to me.

My father was the first to speak: “I'm thankful for the grace of the Lord. He has blessed me with such fortunate circumstances and such wonderful children. And my beautiful wife, of course.” Then he gently kissed my mom on the cheek, and we all pretended not to see that she wiped it off afterward.

We spoke counter-clockwise and the last in order was Kara. She clinked her glass with a purple fingernail and slurred “Thanksgiving, huh? What a piece of shit day. Not even a real holiday, just you old fucks getting together and circle-jerking over family values.”

She paused to take a swig of her drink, then burped into her hand. “Sorry. Where was I? Right, I'm thankful that I don't have to live in this house anymore, 'cause my mom's a frigid cow with a spear of spring asparagus up her ass. You all know it, you eat her shit. Eat. Her. Fucking shit, that's right, I said it, everything she does is just a gigantic load of – hick – bullshit. And you –” she pointed to my dad, or rather to the air next to his head, because she was too drunk to coordinate her movements with her eyesight. “You goddamn hypocrite, I hope your voters all find out what a hard-working father you are, yeah some family man you claim to be, what, is Chen a part of the family too? Because I think that'd count for incest or something since you fuck her all the time.”

Our maid, who had just opened the door from the kitchen and readied herself to leave for her own family, stopped dead in her tracks with her features contorted in the same deer-in-the-headlights expression, she must have worn when my mom caught her sucking my dad's dick. We all knew it happened behind closed doors, but no one before Kara had ever spoken so loudly about it.

Kara, oblivious to the toe-curlingly awkward silence around her, continued: “don't take this the wrong way, Chen, homegirl: you can totally be a part of my crew; you're the bomb. Love your dumplings, girl. Ditch my dad, come live with me at campus and we'll have a – hick – fucking blast. Right, right, I got off track there. Um... I'm thankful for my, um, Lexus, too. Thanks for that. So, yeah, I'm gonna leave now. Bet you're all thankful for _that._ ” With one last hiccup, she paraded out of the room and eventually the house, all the while belting Sister Sledge's _We_ _Are_ _Family_.

My mom coughed, a delicate sound like tiny glass bells. “Chen, dear, I'm sorry about that. You can go home now. I'll send you a check first thing tomorrow morning for your over-time. Happy Thanksgiving.”

Chen looked as though she might need a six-figure check for what she had just been through, and I couldn't blame her. What the fuck was going on with Kara? First she was sulky and silent on the porch, but through the window I saw how she waltzed down the street in a purple boa before she got into her car and drove into the night.

We ate the rest of the meal in awkward conversation about the Millers' lawn decoration and stock market prices.

 

After dinner my mom sent me into the kitchen where I, along with Aunts Millie and Josephine, had to wash the dishes and stash away the massive turkey-corpse that still resided half-eaten on its silver plate. At least being a boarding school student meant I didn't have to eat Turkey for the next two weeks.

“Kara sure got drunk tonight,” I said when the only sound for twenty minutes had been the squeaks of rubber gloves on glass.

My two aunts looked at each other. “We have to tell you something,” said Aunt Josephine. She sighed heavily and put down a crystal carafe. Her high brow glistened with exhaustion and her dark hair clung to it in thin strands. She looked so much like my mom, it was surreal, except of course that Josephine had more wrinkles than her sister and the smile on her face was a profound one. “Kara is in a vulnerable place right now. You see, while you were away at school, something happened to her.”

“It was that dreadful boy,” Aunt Millie said. The flesh on her neck and face was pink like the turkey and dripped sweat onto her torso and shoulders in the warm kitchen where everything reeked of pumpkin pie and detergent. She slammed her gloved hand down on the counter, so the porcelain rattled and Aunt Josephine hurried to salvage the carafe before it tumbled to the floor.

Aunt Millie nodded, so the fat on her neck jiggled like the jelly we had for dessert. “A fellow student, I think it was even one of her friends - Jeremy, was it? - he forced himself on her. It makes me sick just thinking about it.”

The soapy knife in my hands slowly slipped and lodged itself tip-first into the floor. It didn't wobble or anything, and no one noticed, not even me. It could have sliced off all my toes and I would still only focus on what I had just heard. My stomach churned; I wet my mouth; I had to say something, but had nothing to say.

_who did it what happened where when why would anyone do that to her why is she alone why isn't there anyone with her who what where why why why_

“We're not sure about the circumstances, since it's such a delicate subject, and your mother isn't too keen on talking about it. Why, I don't think she had even planned on telling you herself at all.”

Cue my mom dashing into the kitchen and chirping “goodness, look at the mess in here. We need more dessert, sweetheart.” She tip-toed elegantly past the vertical knife in the floor and obtained a saran-wrapped, bright orange pie from the second shelf in the fridge where everything was color-coordinated and placed in accordance to expiration date.

“Jo, Millie, don't fill him with those scary stories.”

As if what my aunts had told me was nothing more than a tale about the boogie man who waited in my closet with venomous fangs and tentacles. Monsters and boogie men were real; they were Jeremy and he had laid all his fangs and tentacles on someone, on my sister. The floor was spinning under my feet until my mom lead me by her pie-less hand into the living room, where she arranged for me to converse with my cousin Mary about our upcoming college experiences.

Kara only returned around noon on the following day. She had someone else's jacket wrapped around her shoulders and spoke not a word to me or anyone else.

 

...

 

All throughout December, it was like this, too. I went home every weekend because Saint Franklin's offered no after-school activities during that month, and while I expected Kara to stay at Bowdoin, I found her in our couch with a bowl of cereal and the televisionon on highest volume. The scowl on her face only disappeared when she saw me and whispered “you have no idea how relieved I am to see you, god, Mom's driving me crazy. I feel like a prisoner.”

She then threw her arm around me and pulled me into the couch to watch Christmas flicks before I had a change to ask if she had even stepped foot on campus once since our last unfortunate holiday. I can't count how many times I watched _Love_ _Actually_ that year.

Every Saturday at six, my mom reminded her that she had some sort of support-group to attend, but she never made the circumstances clear or mention it as anything but 'that thing you have to do.'

Kara rolled her eyes and strode out the door with her ring-clustered middle finger all up in my mom's face. One of these nights after she had left, I attempted to strike up a conversation with my mom about what the fuck was going on, because every weekend that I returned home left me more clueless than calculus class.

My mom swerved away from the subject every time. “She deals with things her own way, Brendon” or “would you help me decorate the hall for Christmas?”

For three fucking hours we cut out these insanely crinkled paper hearts under the advise of some complicated instructions in french. My mom clicked her tongue at me when I failed to translate them for her 'after my three years of Saint Franklin's french classes'.

I told her that I had Spanish, not French. She scoffed and said “what an uncultivated language.”

When my hand ached too much from holding onto the scissor in the same claw-like posture, and my head ached too much from her voice, I made us both eggnog with a generous dosage of both vanilla and my dad's precious _Foursquare_ rum. She took one look at the mixture, picked a single snowflake-piece of eggshell from her glass and chucked the whole thing in the trashcan.

 

Kara wasn't right about that family value circle-jerk. Our family had no values apart from the bundles of money they anointed us with on Christmas morning. My heart fluttered at the bills and the thought of how long they could last me once Spencer and I had deserted Saint Franklin's, in fact the sheer amount of currency in my hands that holiday distracted me from everything else: my hands unwrapping a brand new _Baume & Mercier Clifton Chronograph;_ the five-row pearl necklace my dad clasped around my mom's neck as she stiffly thanked him; opal and jade rings weighing down Kara's left hand; the abundance of specialty chocolate truffles spilling from the gilded holiday baskets on the table before us; when Aunt Josephine dropped a bottle of _Cristal_ and Uncle James opened another without fretting about the wasted dollars dampening our carpet.

On the day of my departure, Kara and I came down to the dinner table. She drew letters in a pile of sugar she had poured from the brand new crystal container that Aunt Josephine gave my mom a few days earlier.

It was my final chance for talking about it face to face. Comfort Kara and hug her because no one else did; that's for sure. I had just said “do you want to talk about –” when our mom bounced from the kitchen in freshly applied makeup and placed a stack of pancakes on the table in front of us. So much steam rose from them, that I could barely see Kara's face, but they looked perfectly golden-brown and fluffy, and their aroma of vanilla and cardamom caused my stomach to growl.

“How did you get these? Did you prostitute yourself to Mrs. Miller in exchange for baked goods?” asked Kara without looking up from her sugary spelling of the words 'religious twatfaced cunt'.

My mom ignored her and stacked four pancakes on both our plates, drizzled syrup on them and placed a fresh strawberry at the top of each pile. “I cooked them,” she said with a big insecure smile on her face. It was wobbly and cracked her foundation at the corners of her mouth, and if _that_ was her genuine smile, I was quite satisfied with fake ones. They, at least, looked normal and not like they came from a horror movie.

“Oh, so you had a chance to put poison in here?” Kara looked up at our mom, whose expectant smile had slid off like the top pancake on my plate, slippery from syrup. Then she bit off half a pan-cake before she spat it out on our mom's velvet slippers in a grainy, barely chewed mass of brown. “Guess I was right; it tastes like cyanide.”

Then she left her family (meaning me. Plus my mom, who looked more like a ghost than a living being) and slammed the front door. That was the last time I ever saw both Kara and my mom, because the Arizona-bus arrived and departed from our address ten minutes later. Not that I was too sad about missing out on my mom's possibly poisoned pancakes.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> back to saint franklin's in chapter 8, which will be up this monday as per usual (fun fact: it's my personal fave).


	8. Chapter 8

When everyone who was supposed to leave had left the school, I trotted off to Annex G. I planned to carry a blanket and pillow with me, that is, until I pictured a random student who would interrogate me about my destination. This nuisance would joke about whether or not I planned on sleeping in the bell tower, and if I said yes, he'd want to join me, but if I said no, he'd frown and ask “where are you sleeping then” and I would have to murder him.

I probably shouldn't say that. You might think I actually meant it, but again, I have to remind you that Mr. Sharp was an accident.

Half-way past the bell tower I realized that if I had brought a blanket and met a fellow student, I could have told him I was planning to sleep over at Mr. Ross' annex. The student would tattle to a teacher who would walk right in on me and Ryan, and then they'd throw me out of the school. Plan completed. Yeah, I should do that, but right before I turned to fetch my evidence, I found myself at my original destination, literally, since I had no idea how and when I got to the point where I stood outside of Ryan's door.

He opened it with a “I saw you from the window. Aren't you supposed to be home on weekend?”

The idea of having to explain frustrated me so that I nearly slammed the door in his face and left, but the air condition from inside cooled my heated skin and brain, so I said “do I look like I'm home on weekend?” and walked past him into the living room.

Ryan discovered the remote for the television squished between two sofa cushions and dragged it out of there, all covered in lint and fingerprints of melted chocolate. It required a good shake and rearrangement of the batteries before he managed to zap on the television.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“I understand.”

I didn't reply to that, and eventually he flipped open a colossus of a book.

Somehow the phone call had exhausted me so badly, all I wanted to do was sleep. I all but tripped into the couch and swatted at the blanket as if it was some disruptive fly. It was warm anyway, so much that a border of sweat was lapping at the bight of Ryan's hair, which he kept pushing out of his face.

He was reading his book, and the sweat on my thighs adhered me to him in our adjacent positions. I listened to the hum of the television and the void which expanded inside my head until nothing else could fit in there. I never dealt well with silences and was constantly tempted to reach out and flip a page in Ryan's book before he did just to fill this one. The game show was so boring, I started counting the seconds between each flip of a page to see how fast he finished a page.

Finally the pent-up nothingness overpowered me and I asked him what he was reading.

Ryan turned away from his book, the furrow between his brows smoothing itself. “ _Ulysses_ ,” he replied.

“That's not for us, right?” I asked, because if I had to finish that thing, it would require at least two sabbatical years and someone strapping me to a chair and forcing me to read. Typical of him to throw this at us right before the final chemistry test.

“Not for school, no, but if you want to borrow it...” his voice trailed off and into a smile, into a smirk, and I would have slapped him, gently, mind you, if I possessed more energy than what it required to un-stick my face from his arm, where it made a suction cup noise and left behind a bright pink hotplate-ellipsis of my cheek. For the moment I just glared at him, which only stretched his smile further, and it was perfectly even and carefree in both sides, so I glared at him some more.

“What's it about?” I asked.

He scratched his neck as the half-smirk on his face faltered to a tepid twitch at the corner of his mouth. “It's about life and stuff. Everyday life. There's these two men in Dublin and it's, well, it's _very_   well written,” he assured me. He sounded anything but convinced at his own words, and as he admitted awareness of this, the smile reappeared. “But I'm not actually sure what the fuck it's about since it's the first time I've read it and it's really hauling ass. Half a page in and I want to throw it across the room and tear out all the pages.”

I twisted fully away from the screen and directed my attention at him. I'd never heard him say something like 'hauling ass' before, and though Pete and Gabe said it all the time, the obscenity sounded much better coming from him.

“Is that a bad thing?”

“It's a pioneer in modernist literature.” He picked at a corner of the cover. The book was falling apart; its spine hung and flapped from the front cover and the pages were the exact color of dough that tainted Levi Daniels' face. “You either like it or you don't, but if you don't, you're practically illiterate.” He huffed as if this was common knowledge, like the temperature difference between Fahrenheit and Celsius or the correct line of presidents. Then again, those things often slipped my mind, too, and maybe that justified his huff.

“Let me get this straight,” I said, leaning toward Ryan but carefully maintaining enough distance to avoid gluing my face to his skin again. “If you willingly choose a book you truly find interesting instead of reading a thousand page book you hate, you're illiterate?”

“In essence,” he said, and then something more, which I never latched onto because my brain fought to remember what color best described his eyes.

“And you wonder why I don't like reading,” I said. Chocolate? In which case, was it Cadbury's milk chocolate or Hershey's?

“I actually do, yeah,” he said, laughing, and in the end his eyes were brown, plain brown like the table in front of us or some random tree trunk outside, but they were pretty and never strayed too far away from my face, and eight percent of males are color-blind anyway. Now there's common knowledge for you. I told Ryan this and he laughed even more.

I reached out for the remote control on the other side of him, resting my head in his lap on the retreat, and zapped to channel two and a documentary about a woman who owned fifty two greyhounds.

Zap, cooking show, zap, a meaningful cartoon series about hope and friendship created by a beloved kid's book illustrator, zap, millions of children die in Uganda while I'm sucking Ryan's cock, zap, the world is a horrible place to live in, zap, Ryan slammed his book shut and hurled it across the room, focusing instead on the upper part of my neck and the spot behind my ear where no amount of combing could cover the blossoming hickey.

Zap, cooking show, zap, I loved living on planet earth.

Zap, zap, zap away three hours and the clock read a quarter past the hour where Ryan usually demanded that I return to my room. Zap, the television jolted me out of my drowsy half-lidded state of lust. I recognized that voice the nasality of that voice, the drawled R's he couldn't repress no matter how hard he tried.

I yanked my neck away from Ryan's mouth and turned up the volume just in time to catch “I've been working hard with my people, for my people,” and the look on the man's face that bellowed “I practiced this line twenty different ways to blend in with the working class where I so clearly don't belong.”

The reporter brushed away a tendril of hair blowing in the wind. The glare of the streetlight turned it a soft pink, but it wasn't her that I stared at, it was the man she was interviewing. She resorted to sharp yells to be heard through both the storm and my dad when she inquired “another link in your campaign will be released Thursday, which we're all very excited about, can you lift the veil on that?”

“Yes,” said my dad as his face cracked like the thunder-sky above him to reveal blinding white in a secretly-dentist-corrected smile. “During these past weeks me and my wife have visited various companies to truly interview the workers. The system needs change, and we're here to bring that.”

“There's been a lot of talk about the Democratic candidate for the next presidential election. What are your thoughts?”

My dad skipped over her question, agile as ever, “We support the people and whomever the people elect as their upcoming leader. That doesn't mean me and my team will not do our best to ascertain that our bills are followed through.”

The reporter winked, or maybe a leaf blew into her eye, and asked “Governor Urie, are you telling me you might run for president yourself one day?”

No, he isn't, you moron. My dad would never say such a thing, but you bet your pinstriped ass he rubbed himself at night when my mom slept, imagining himself in the oval office with his dick out and a Marilyn Monroe look-alike to suck it. My mom, ironically, had that Jackie Onassis jaw and ebony bob, but my dad for sure looked nothing like Kennedy, and together they composed a truly mismatched couple.

The storm caught my dad's jovial laughter, and the following roar of the television hurricane settled in my head. Bitter disappointment had replaced all traces of satisfaction and the aftertaste of Ryan in my mouth. He was nearly all I tasted these days, all I saw and smelled and thought of.

“I'm flattered you would think that,” he said, “But I have a family to take care of for a few years more.”

Cue my mom entering the picture in her floral dress, delicate hands covering her stomach.

The holiday episode erupted in my mind of her throwing away the eggnog I made for her. Sipping a glass of water for Thanksgiving while the rest of us drank wine. I should have noticed, but there was that whole ordeal with Kara and then the escape and Peter Sharp. My head weighed a ton but felt like it was made of cotton, it was so woolen in there. Projectile-thoughts bombarded the inner surfaces of my skull, exploding behind my eyelids in an eternal tapestry of baby shoes and baby food and my mom the size of the pilates exercise ball behind Ryan's couch.

“My, my, a third child _and_ a seat in senate? I'll wish you good luck with that, Governor,” the reporter said before she turned toward the camera. The wind tore at her hair and whipped it all over the screen, but she managed to yell her goodbyes nonetheless. “And with that, it's off for a terrific year for front-runner Boyd Urie from Nevada. Stay tuned for more of the national news on this year's election for senate –” A whirlwind brought with it a flying plastic chair four feet away from her spot, and a bright yellow pail bypassed her head by mere inches, which overall downplayed the intended dramatic effect of her little pause. “This was brought to you by Audrey Kitching on channel four! And now back to the studio.”

The show cut to a grease-slicked news anchor, and a silence far greater than the one a few hours earlier filled the living room. An agonizing amount of minutes, which I was too stunned to count, later, Ryan's hand covered mine.

“That was your dad,” he said, softly, pointlessly.

“And my mom,” I said. “And apparently some kid inside her.”

Silence. Silence, silence, the piercing sound of nails on a chalkboard. My eyes floated aimlessly around the room for any item to possibly hit myself in the head with, just so I could tear myself out of the surreal situation.

In the end my only weapon was Ryan, saying “I'm sorry you had to find out this way.”

He made no excuses for them, no “they probably don't want to stress you right before exams,” and a delightful lack of “I'm sure they love you”. Just silence and his fingers looped loosely around my hand, occasionally brushing the tendons in it.

Happy birthday Brendon, here's another sibling we're going to douse with attention of the right kind. Congratulations on your eighteenth, you may now be drafted and also excused from being a part of this family. You're finally an adult and we no longer have to pretend we care about you! Blow out the candles, son! Unwrap your presents!

“If your parents make you feel like a failure, then they've failed as parents. Simple as that.”

“Except it's not,” I said. My voice sounded foreign to my own ears: a robotic monotone from a body that wasn't really in the room, but instead drafted somewhere between the moon and the roof of the school. “It's shit.”

“Absolute shit,” Ryan agreed. He got up to lock the front door, and as he did, the picture on the wall fell down once again. He hung it up in the same way he always did, with the back of the yellowed frame facing the room.

“Why do you hang it like that?” I asked when he returned to the couch.

“I don't like looking at it,” he said, “it reminds me why I'm here.”

“And why are you here?”

He appeared to deliberate whether or not to answer, but apparently it wasn't that important. “I only work here because they know me. I studied here for three years, and my dad attended the school for four. He got me the job.”

“Oh,” I said. “So that picture, the one from sixty six...”

“I don't really fancy any unwanted family portraits hanging in my living room, yeah.”

“When did you go here?”

He told me the year of his graduation and I thought about the hundreds of pictures in the main hall of the old 'classes of this and that year'. Wondered which one of them he hung in and why I'd never noticed.

“Did you know,” he told me, “that the school's budget is way in the red numbers? They're running themselves into the ground, spending more and more money on something as simple as heating up the buildings and replenishing electronics. I'm on two thirds of a payload, actually, and so are most of the other teachers.”

Unsure of what to do with this information, I just nodded.

“I give them three, five years at best before they have to turn the lock and let this place become a museum. No one wants to work here, that's why I was able to get the job as quickly as I did.”

He pulled me by the shoulder onto his chest and changed the channel to one of those that dedicated themselves to informing its viewers about lottery numbers and other profitable call-in-and-win quiz shows hosted by women in tight dresses and men in obscenely large bowties. For a few hours my parents were shit, and they would remain shit the following morning, but everything including me and Ryan was still and glowed peacefully in the blue glare of the television.

 

...

 

The next morning I woke with Ryan's foul morning breath right in my ear and half on top of him, in his arms but not on the couch. The television still blasted the lottery numbers of the week from inside the living room, but here I had never been. A look around informed me I was in his bedroom.

Did we...?

The sheets smelled clean enough and my body only hurt the way it did when I had slept on something sharp and angular – in this case Ryan – so I concluded not.

The gruesome thought that I might have fallen asleep on top of him sprung into my head, but just as quickly it skipped out again. Of course not.

My mouth was dry and my bladder threatened to burst. As the regret of drinking so much soda set in, I edged my way out of the bed and into the bathroom. Leaving felt wrong somehow, as if once I exited, I could never return to the pile of blankets on the bed and the belongings on the floor next to it.

CD's reclined on towers of books and lyric booklets with missing pages flapped as the gush of air from my movements hit them. Postcard-bookmarks and candy-wrappers and a mess so extensive you'd think the room belonged to any student on the school, not a teacher. 

Despite my irrational worries, the door knob yielded under the weight of my fingers just the same when I returned, and the door creaked as I opened it. Ryan still slept in the same position with the blanket covering only half his leg and one arm wedged between the mattress and the wall. My chest swelled at the sight. Or my lungs. My internal organs played Twister, drunkenly and violently kicking at each other and my throat and the lowest part of my gut. For a minute, two minutes, for so long my shadow slid a few inches over the floor, I just stood there and observed him. The gauzy light speared through the small window and striated the wooden floorboards and the CD collection, but most importantly Ryan's back and the faint sunburn on it.

Hesitating, I discarded my briefs with Ryan's last-night buttered popcorn-fingerprints all over them and tripped across the floor to the bed. The mattress was one of those ultra-soft ones – the less mattress money, the more liquor for the headmaster, I guessed – and as soon as I sank onto it, it sloped drastically downward and Ryan began rolling toward the edge of it. I braced one hand on the warm skin of his back, and prevented farther movement.

He groaned a little. The sound was indeterminable yet undoubtedly my name. His posture was a half-exposed one and his lashes fluttered in a part of sleep I had no idea how close was to consciousness.

I straddled him slowly, all the while watching the curve of his throat and the concave of his ribs spread out for my estate view. There was lust in my mouth and my stomach and my hands, the latter of which overflowed with sweat so much that it eased the glide, but not enough to erase the friction, and in the middle of a blink his eyes flew open and his “what do you think you're doing?” interrupted me and sent me reeling so much, I toppled off him and my hands fell to the mattress for support.

“I don't think so,” he said firmly.

I wavered from my place atop his wiry thighs, bewildered and insignificant. “Why?”

“You don't want this,” he said but it was a lie and an excuse for the nuance of shame in his eyes.

He gave this sigh, like we were in class and I was stupid and he had to explain simple grammar rules to me again, but instead of actually clarifying, he said “it's complicated” in a diminishing adult tone before he finally pushed me off himself and sat up straight in bed. He pulled a t-shirt from the floor and made his way to the bathroom, pulling it on. The back of the shirt fluttered around the top of his thighs but tented enough in the front to raise another wave of saliva in my mouth.

“Why don't you want me?” I called after him, feeling stupid and forgotten on the cheap mattress.

“Is it because I'm too young?” When he ceased to answer, I jumped up from the bed and padded after him into the bathroom, where the shower drowned out the faint noise of something slick, not shampoo.

“Because I'm not,” I shouted. My hands curled into fists and pounded on the door without my permission, and I annoyed him but he was just jacking off in there without me, so I had every right to. “I'm not too young; I turn eighteen tomorrow.”

The door opened and Ryan stood there with shampoo in his hair and stared, eyes no longer wide with lust, but genuine confusion. “You're not eighteen yet?” His voice sounded smaller than I felt, and we both just stood there without clothes on either side of the door and it was so incredibly stupid.

“Well, no,” I admitted, suddenly unsure.

“Fuck,” he muttered to his own toes in the puddle of water on the floor. “I thought you were legal.”

“Tomorrow I am,” I said, which sparked half a smile on his behalf, and a widening in the door opening as he invited me inside.

I brushed my teeth while he finished the shower, and neither of us wanted to have sex or do anything but avoid each other. Nevertheless I had nowhere to go and he had nothing to do, so he offered me to go to the town.

“Are you sure?”

“It's your birthday. Your _eighteenth_ birthday,” he clarified, just in case I had forgotten. I hadn't.

 

...

 

Twenty minutes later I had on my jacket, the one I forgot a few weeks earlier. While he combed his hair and gathered forgotten coins from the pages of books and inside cups, all in one chaotic motion, I waited by the door, pleased for once to be the first to finish.

He was like a whirlwind, hair and limbs all over the place, and even though I knew exactly where his keys were, I liked watching him twirl around.

“They're on top of your microwave,” I said after he had uttered more creative curses than I'd ever read in a Shakespeare play in eighth grade.

“Oh,” he said, kind of breathy. The keys then jingled in his right hand, and his left on the small of my back urged me through the door so he could lock it. His eyes darted from me to the other side, to the gallery behind us.

“There's no one here,” I said, “it's Saturday. There's like... two freshmen and myself.”

Still he kept looking around the corners we passed, his long legs always a step ahead of me so he could scout the area for witnesses to the horrible crime that constituted a teacher and student walking together. We strolled down the hill from school to town, where the gravel dusted Ryan's black dress shoes gray and orange. He took no notice of it, and instead babbled on about the weather.

The instance I reached for his hand, his head whipped around to see if people noticed, and even though no one was around, I bitterly admitted defeat to the complications of explaining my teacher-hand-holding.

The farther we got, the wider the space between us grew until if I reached out, my fingertips no longer touched his, and as the first houses greeted us, I stopped trying.

At midday the sleepy town was just waking up, and the shopkeepers unfolded their signs and rolled down their canopies to shield their stores from the blistering sun. After the downhill walk, sweat already beaded in my armpits. I regretted shaving them. Ryan shaved nothing but his face and he certainly didn't trace his fingertips over my smooth skin like I'd hoped he might.

We walked with enough space between us that no one would suspect us even going to the same place, but when he stopped outside Sally's Burger's & Fries, so did I. 

“Uh, you should probably stay outside.” He talked out of the corner of his mouth. His eyes fixated on the neon sign above us, squinting at something. Just as quietly as he had spoken to me, he said “they spelled it wrong” and I had no idea what he referred to but I nodded and scraped my shoes in the dust on the sidewalk. I should have brought my iPod with me, because what kind of teenager hung alone outside a diner on a Saturday? It was bound to rouse suspicion, and sure enough, a police officer at the donut shop lifted his hand to shade his gaze as it swept over me the same way a searchlight would.

I applied my most angelic expression, but the officer knew nothing about my sins and waddled along the street with his belly spilling over his baton and gun holster. I bet you a hundred dollars I could outrun this man in every possible arena, but the farther away he moved, it became less necessary to do so, and my breathing soon steadied. No one was on my heels, threatening imprisonment.

When my side of the street emptied of nosy passersby, I angled my neck to look inside the diner. Dust and cooking grease covered the windows, but I spotted Ryan standing next to a jukebox or crane machine of sorts, waiting for his order. The clocks in the watch shop to my left informed me of the half hour passed since he requested I wait for him. I still had no clue why he asked me to come along. My initial idea of our quest involved the grocery store and enough ready meals until Sunday evening when the kitchen would serve the final dinner of the week, presumably meat loaf.

He could have just stayed at home. Then he wouldn't have to worry about anyone seeing us together. My stomach ached and my throat felt plastered with wet gauze, it was that hot.

“Ready?” Ryan asked, again out of the corner of his mouth. “Follow me – casually – to the next bus stop, get on the bus, sit two seats away from me and get off when I do, not a minute before.”

I snorted and rolled my eyes at the sky, a cloud-free metaphor for his high maintenance behavior. “You act like you're in a James Bond movie or something,” I said.

He ignored me and proceeded down the street with his plastic bag swinging. Without any clue about what else to do, I followed.

We boarded yellow dust-covered bus number fourteen. I sat two seats behind him and watched a ladybug crawl along his hairline without his notice. An elderly lady boarded the bus as well and squashed herself and her two bags of kitty litter between us.

Barren trees, barren hills, the number of houses dwindled and in the middle of nowhere, the bus stopped. When Ryan left his seat at the same time as the old lady left hers, the ladybug still sat in his hair.

“Gee, it's warm today, don't you think?” She hoisted her kitty litter one by one off the seat, and I waited for her to drag the bags out of the bus. Inch by inch her thin arms heaved the fifty pound bags along. She could be going anywhere and nowhere at the same time; the area consisted only of shrubbery, lizards and the shimmering air above the asphalt. There were no houses in sight anywhere.

“Very,” said Ryan, not looking at her. Finally she stepped on the ground outside the bus, and I could too. The dry air hit me like a bus, not this bus, but one where the engine actually worked and the vehicle drove at more than thirty miles per hour.

The literal bus drove away, and when the dust-cloud passed, she looked from me to Ryan behind her bottle-bottom glasses.

“Say, aren't you from that school uphill? You're that new teacher who replaced poor Peter Sharp – may he rest in peace – and you must be his student.” she said to me.

If it had been possible in the heat, all blood would have drained from Ryan's face, but even in ninety degrees, his cheeks paled. His mouth opened and closed several times, but nothing left it.

“Back in my time Saturday was a regular school day, and we had classes from eight to six, every day. And evening prayer too, don't forget that. We certainly never had those one on one excursions you kids get today.” She shook her head so violently, her hair began sliding down the left of her skull, revealing its secondhand status as a wig. It only made sense since it was far too red to be natural for her age. With a sigh she pushed it back in its place, which only resulted in a more discreet avalanche to the right. “Oh, I'm just chattering on now, but you two have a nice field trip.”

We stood there, dumbfounded, as she dragged her kitty litter behind her to wherever her destination, and I felt a twinge of something surreal, like her whole appearance had been nothing but a mirage or an omen.

“This was stupid, god it was stupid, what was I _thinking_ , I'm so irresponsible.” Ryan muttered his way through a litany of self-doubt, curling and uncurling the one fist that didn't contain a bag. When the concern he might actually hit himself grew to a threat, I grabbed his wrist and asked

“who do you think she'll tell? The woman was so senile, she got off at the wrong bus stop. It's no big deal. And she's right; it's just a field trip. It's not like we're fucking in a museum during school hours.”

Ryan replaced his twitching and cursing with a look of utter disbelief.

“Don't say that, someone could hear you,” he hissed lowly.

Please. Who? The old lady? She was probably both deaf and blind and in any case nowhere to be seen. “What? Oh come on, it'd be fun,” I tempted, stepping around him in a mock victory dance.

“It wouldn't,” he grit out. His weak spot had revealed itself and manifested in waves of pink and red on his cheeks, and I enjoyed every second of it.

“It would! We could find one of those niches with like a vase in them, or against the wall or in the souvenir shop, we could even use some of the souvenirs, in fact I think they sell replica handcuffs in the law and order museum on first –”

“No.”

I danced around him, victorious, encircling him like he was prey. My voice found its way into his ear, right above his tensed shoulder and the clench of his jaw. “What's your deal then? Cinemas? Under the table in a restaurant, because I could totally do that for you. Provided there's a table cloth, of course. Or we could just find a deserted classroom, you know, we use the matinee every Thursday but not Tuesdays and Fridays. The tables aren't so rough on the back, not that I'd mind, in fact I'd love for you to take me on one, it'd be so hot –”

“There. Is. Nothing. Exciting. About. Getting. _Caught_.” His voice changed from the gritted staccato to a long-winded sigh to a softly spoken “I shouldn't have brought you here.”

“Regretting me already?” I teased, but under the joke was an underlying truth that he might, that I was screwing everything up again and crashing through boundaries I didn't know other people had.

No reply.

Fuck. _fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck._ “Hey, I'm sorry, okay? I forgot, the, you know. I forgot.”

It was so easy to forget that there had been someone before me, another student. Other after school specials, kinder words, less paranoia. I was the second time, the relapse, the bitter recognition of a substance-abuse problem. In my mind I had to be better, wilder and more wicked than this other guy who had been older and smart and probably well-read. Since I was anything but, I had little to offer in terms of

_you're a quick-fix until he realises how ruined you really are and then you're a crash-diet, a heroin overdose, a gambling addiction he can't get rid off, i_ s _that what you want,_ I don't want anything, _you want this, you want him_

sustainability. Peter Sharp's corpse flickered forth on my eyelids in poor-connection television quality and I winced at the visage.

Somewhere in reality Ryan's voice sounded “are you okay?” and forced me to open my eyes to the dizzying sight of the ground spinning up at me. If I'd eaten anything yet, it would have come right back up.

_face it, you're just not worth the trouble you're a mess mess mess._

“I got carried away there,” I said tamely. “I won't joke about it again.”

He nodded and for the second time that day led me by the small of my back to a clutter of leaf-less trees, to an uneven spot of dirt, which overlooked part of the lake below us. It was a mostly straight fall until you met the cliffs below, a few miles away from the spot me and the guys used to jump from in summer last year. I helped Ryan unfold his scarf into a makeshift picnic blanket and secured it with four rocks at the corners. The damned thing would be no good for wear after this, but it seemed he didn't care the slightest as he sat down and motioned for me to join him in un-packing the loot.

Golden breaded onion rings, mozzarella sticks, french fries, fried bits of something I couldn't even recognize, everything deep-fried and shining with grease, one regular and one sesame-less cheeseburger with orange dressing melting onto the oil-stained wrappers, topped off with two plastic cups of lukewarm strawberry milkshake.

“A feast for kings,” he said and sucked cheese from his pinky finger.

“The last underage supper,” I suggested and received a small smile in return.

Having not eaten in too many hours, I bit straight into a jalapeño popper and dug out the gooey plastic-like cheese with my tongue. So many breadcrumbs covered Ryan's fingers, they resembled mozzarella sticks of their own, and having run out of the actual snacks, I sucked them free and reveled in the hitch of breath, the ink-drop widening of his pupils, everything seen before but a million times magnified by the way my tongue swiped the convergence between his fore- and index finger.

“Finish your burger,” he stammered as the salad and pickle slices slipped from his burger and onto his precious scarf without his notice.

If you've ever tried to eat a burger in a seductive manner, you know how difficult it is and how much finger-licking it requires for a food that's not fried chicken.

Once finished, I flopped over on my back and turned my head to the cloudless sky. “That was amazing. I've never had so much grease in one meal.”

“I've never had so much grease in my whole life.” Ryan wiped off his fingers with a corner of his scarf, having run out of napkins twenty french fries ago. “I'm so glad I don't live here.”

This made me laugh. “But you do.”

“It's only temporary.”

“Isn't everything?”

He lay down next to me with his feet and head off the edges of the scarf and a hundred small rocks and a lizard as his headrest. “How philosophic of you. Tell Hallmark I'm impressed.”

Even at the insult, I couldn't contain the grin that stretched my mouth to the size of a melon-slice, huge and bright and refreshing. The brine scent of the lake should unnerve me after what had happened on it, but I had never felt more peaceful until that moment where I rested on the scarf, a dozen flints dug into my ass and my parents and their birthday-presents (the one in my mom's uterus in particular) glittered at their absence a whole state away. “Shut up,” I said, languid.

A shadow fell on my face from where Ryan had perched himself on one elbow and looked down on me with an illegible expression.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“It's tomorrow, assface,” I said, unable to withhold my laughter. “How'd you already forget?”

“But tomorrow everyone will congratulate you and my wish will drown in the ocean of admiration you receive from your peers. Your phone will buzz alive with text messages declaring their love and appreciation, and tell me, how can my humble present compete with the dozens of roses and diamonds you must receive from your friends?” He shuffled in the plastic bag behind him and when he found the desired item, instructed me to close my eyes.

“Here,” he said and placed something soft in my hands. “Open.”

The item in question was a neon orange plush dog the size of my open palm, with black plastic eyes and crooked painted on teeth. It looked like something from a low budget horror movie.

“I won it myself at Sally's crane machine. It's supposed to represent your transition from youth to adulthood. That's why it looks so scary.”

If a fruit larger than a watermelon existed, my smile was about that size. “Are you sure it's not supposed to represent the fact that you didn't have time to buy a real gift?”

Ryan shook his head at this. “No, it represents what I said. It's very important.”

“Okay,” I laughed. “I'm going to lie and tell you that I love it to avoid breaking your heart.”

“Look, you can even open its jaw with this velcro tape,” Ryan said and wrought apart the jaws of the dog with a horrible screeching sound. “Woof woof, love me, Brendon.”

“Are you sure you're not the one turning eighteen tomorrow?” I asked him and twisted the toy from his hands. I strangely cared about the risk of him tearing it to pieces by accident. “Or eight?”

He slumped back on the scarf-covered ground. The space half above my head, half next to me felt empty after his occupancy.

“Some people don't act their age,” he said, more to himself than me judging by the lack of volume and morose tone of voice. After this he didn't talk to me for a while and the sun informed us that time passed closer to dinner and the last bus home, but neither of us bothered to raise ourselves from the ground or even untangle our fingers enough to clean up the abundance of food wrappers.

“Hey, Ryan,” I asked after a while.

“Yes?”

“You've read a lot. What are some famous literary canines I can name this monster after?”

“Well, there's Lassie, but she was a collie. And Toto from _The Wizard of Oz_ , but I don't think the quote goes 'I've a feeling we're not in Arizona anymore'. Then there's Old Yeller and Jip, and Cujo, which actually fits perfectly since that movie scared me half to death.

“Cujo's good,” I slurred. My eyes slipped shut while I listened to his voice. It had the same ability as the sun to turn you warm and drowsy and unwilling to move from your honey state of bliss.

“But you could also go with these,” he said as I zoned out. I had to sit up straight to prevent unconsciousness from gripping me too tightly. This alerted Ryan to the time and the fact that the last bus drove home in less than a minute.

He cursed and yanked me up by the hand he was already holding. We left trash and good conscience behind, sprinting past cactuses and shrubbery just in time to not get run over by the lazy bus that rolled in front of the bus stop. The bus was empty except for the kitty litter lady whose hands now clutched nothing but the dress bundled in her lap. She smiled at me and Ryan, and the huge glasses magnified the way her eyes trailed from our faces to the clasped hands between us, and in the same way the sun would, her eyes scorched so fiercely, we broke apart as if she had burned us.

For the rest of the bus ride, Ryan didn't speak to me.

For the remaining walk through town, Ryan didn't speak to me.

For the uphill struggle to Saint Franklin's, Ryan didn't speak to me, and I walked two steps behind him with my toy-dog Cujo in a throat-lock with my left index finger and thumb. I hadn't owned a stuffed animal for ten years and it comforted me to feel the weight of one in my hand despite the gnawing dread in my stomach.

 

...

 

The sky outside never reached true darkness; it was but a purple hued parody of it. The clock stroke midnight and Ryan's voice came from the bed next to me for the first time in six hours: “tomorrow's today now.” His teeth gleamed white in the way-past twilight hour. Apparently the woman on the bus didn't matter now; the dim of the bedroom concealed us from the world. No silence, no deliberate not-touches. In fact plenty of those. One on my left shoulder, another on my hip.

It was warm.

Ryan's hand was on my shoulder.

It was warm and Ryan's hand was on my shoulder and two fingers of his other hand curled behind the elastic band in my boxers.

A moon beam swept across the floor and the mattress, which despite its decade spent on the school had never been upgraded to a real bed, and my thigh fit itself between his.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I asked. After all these weeks, months, of restricting his touches to the bare minimum, even when that minimum was fondling my ass for hours on the couch, he had never allowed himself to yield. Always there was a self-control to his movements, containing something he probably believed was dangerous, and with every “you need to sleep, Brendon” and “homework first”, my frustrations piled into a tower of teenage hormones only released in the private shower stall.

Everything else was fine, we did a lot. I loved him in my mouth, between my thighs in his lap. The hours of glorious torture in my chemistry homework if I sat on his fingers brought with them that glorious inability to concentrate on anything but him. But so many weeks and “I can't risk being seen buying condoms” later, it seemed that somewhere between his “it's just another thing they can use against me” and my “can you please just fuck me properly”, we had reached a compromise.

He was _that_ paranoid. But not paranoid enough to not rub his knee against mine, warm and bony. My own knees began shaking and I pressed them against the squishy mattress for it to absorb my quaking. The hand on my shoulder drew me closer and his mouth in the dark asked me “how I felt”, like a cruel (very unnecessary) parody of Greta. If I was ready. As if he needed ask.

A thought struck me that he had waited for this, waited for his own consent to pull down my underwear the way he did, slowly and deliberately grazing everywhere but the areas I wanted so badly for him to touch. He'd waited for the weather to choke me with heat so I wouldn't be too loud when his hand first curled around me.

I had a whole iteration of curse words and praises ready, but showing off my linguistic skills got stashed away for some other time, another night in this bed. His lips dwelled on the junction between my neck and shoulder, warm and dry in contrast to the sharp nails on my other shoulder, to the electric crackles that surged through my bloodstream, my veins like wires in the summer heat. The edge of his teeth contrasted the warm sticky pool in my navel, and he continued to rub against me without rhythm or grace. There was something predatory about his movements, an impending threat of the animal about to break free of its self-constructed cage.

_You're his fix,_ my brain hissed between two lazy strokes of his hand. _He wants your age and your student-status, not you._

His shoulder bumped at mine, his torso and still-dressed hips bucked into me as he attempted to remove his boxers. The skies outside whirled past, cast shadows from the sideways ridge of his nose and ever-long black stripes from his lashes toward his brows. A smile scrunched up his eyes for just a few seconds, which should have been important and a sign that he wasn't taking advantage of me, but compared to the hand wrapped around me, it held no importance whatsoever.

With ease he lifted my legs and asked me if I wanted a pillow. I sensed it all through an obscured layer, like tainted glass or bubble plast: the weight of him pressing me further into the gooey mattress, the curls that tumbled along his cheekbones at the angle he was bent at. The tendons in his neck strained as his eyes escaped down my body, and it hit me that I'd never been naked with him, only half and wholly clothed and chasing the next opportunity we might not get because, oh no, oh please, what if someone caught us? If it was less dark, I could see him rather than sense these things, but the dark amplified his hands on my flesh and the desperation in his breathing.

He spread my legs and all blood evacuated my head in a bewildered pilgrimage south, he spread my legs further and bent my knees toward my face.

Again: “do you want a pillow?”

Through the same stained-glass-bubbleplast-layer, I heard myself reply “I want _you_ ” two octaves lower than my usual voice, followed by a curse so soft, I barely heard it. Too soon his jaw crashed into mine, bone on bone in a reminder of the time he slammed a door into my nose, except this time it felt so good that I saw and tasted stars.

Soon his mouth tickled my pubic bone and I concentrated all my energy on nosebleeds, on Levi Daniels, on the homework in my History class.

There was no pillow anyway, only a bottle of lube and his hands.

A while had passed since the last time I felt this full and the sensation tore a weak groan from my lips. Not so much the concept but more the expectation that in a moment he would fill me even more, bend me into the mattress, fuck me senseless, make me his.

Above me, he paused and his breath on my thighs and the burning stretch stopped for a second before he resumed and my body tightened under his mouth, the small teeth scraping at my skin, nipping, not quite biting. The sweat poured from my every pore and as he licked it away, my eyes rolled back under fluttering lids and the shadow above me took form as a cloud, not his body, and suddenly I was empty before he filled me up again.

He pushed inside with inelegant movements and caused the mattress to slop around like a bar of soap in a bathtub. Through the haze I latched onto a faint “– feel so good, you're perfect,” which hit three tones away from his usual one and pierced my brain and the lack of blood in there. My wind-pipe drew up in the attempt to speak and at the same time not, _you fuck it up when you talk_ , but on my tongue burned a ryanryanryan and I bit my lips and fingers to remain composed.

His nails threatened to rip apart my flesh and his mouth hit mine again and again and effortlessly choked his own name until I couldn't breathe. ryanryanryan, harder, wilder, illuminated by the moon not because it was poetic or beautiful but because some son of a bitch hadn't bothered to put up curtains and anyone with could look right inside if they wanted to.

When I returned from this split-second of paranoia, I expected his attention to be elsewhere; at his book or the fear of being caught or worse, the other student, the guy before me, but it was there in the bedroom, my name, my mouth, in drops on my stomach. 

A long time after we had collapsed, but short enough that the mess on my stomach had not yet dried, his hand swiped through it. His fingers stopped at a bruise, then trailed onto another, squeezing my unfortunate bitten hipbone, and groaned in exasperation.

“Look at this; I knew I shouldn't have agreed.”

My fingers followed the path of his next to the bruises. “I don't know, I kind of like it.”

“But they'll know.” He brought his hand up to chew at the fingers, wringing it in the process, and I swatted it away.

“That I got laid, yeah, but not with a teacher”

Still he rolled off me, and despite the warmth of the room, the lack of body heat caused me to instinctively roll toward him again.

“I'll just have to shower here,” I said. “I'll have to shower here and you have to shower with me to save water and I'll slowly move my things out of my room and into here and just move in with you completely. We could just have classes in here.”

He chuckled. “And that would secure everyone doesn't find out? Us sleeping and eating and showering together?”

“It's a foolproof plan,” I mumbled into some part of his body, probably his arm, but sleep was already asking me to join it. It was his arm. He folded it around my neck. “Us eating together. And sleeping together. Showering. Living together, we should do that, yeah.”

“You need sleep,” he said, and again I felt a strange personal connection to heroin, to the gambling centers in the streets of Vegas, to the prostitutes on those same streets; we all shared the common trait that our only life-purpose was to serve the addict. Bring on the kindergarten teacher voice: _so what do you want to be when you grow up, Brendon?_ Heroin. Ryan's metaphorical heroin.

There were ten weeks left of the school year, ten weeks wasn't so bad? Just ten weeks. One silly little exam. I could do that. “I need more of this,” I said, and received a kiss on my shoulder blade.

 

...

 

At some point during the night my main focus on our affair had drifted from 'this can get me thrown out' to 'this can get Ryan thrown out,' and while the transition was a delicate glass bridge, its shattering resounded with an ear-splitting crash the moment Spencer returned from his weekend at home. Rewind the reel a little and you'll find me and Ryan at his kitchen table.

“How do you feel about taking your SATs next month?” he asked through a mouthful of store-brand cereal.

How do you feel about stabbing yourself in the kidney with a pocket knife? How do you feel about swallowing a snake? How do you feel about lighting your own hair on fire?

“Fine,” I lied. “But I can take them in June, too, right?”

“You can, but wouldn't it be better to have them out of the way?”

It would be better if I didn't have to take them at all.

“They're not that bad,” he said. “You should take more than three subject tests; it heightens your chances. But only if you're up to it of course. The science one is difficult, but then again it's not _my_ strongest subject.”

He yapped on and on about how much more difficult it had been when he took them, which must have been half a century ago, and how the most annoying thing was that he had no time for his friends or his books while studying for them. I zoned out.

“Don't worry, you'll complete them just fine. It takes a lotto fail them,” he said and poured himself the crumby remnants of _Captain Choco._

“Such as what?” I lifted a spoon of milky mush to my lips, but couldn't force myself to open them and swallow it. I had no appetite; anxiety occupied all of my stomach.

“Showing up, for one thing, is a good indicator of whether or not you pass.” He smiled widely and flicked a piece of puffed rice at me, and it was okay; his smile made everything okay; of course I could pass one or three silly little standardized tests.

 

The one test I couldn't pass was the one Spencer put me through the minute I returned to our room. I thought I could make it back before him, but then me and Ryan had to wash the dishes and I helped him look for the cover of _Ulysses_ , which seemed to have evaporated or escaped through a black hole underneath the couch, and then we tumbled onto the couch and I had to borrow fresh underwear from him, which was in the bedroom, and the bedroom had a bed; his lips had me by the throat in a hushed “can't keep my hands off you.”

Long story short: I spent two thirds of my eighteenth birthday having mind-blowing sex.

All that stopped the minute I saw Spencer's frosty eyes above the top edge of his laptop. The computer was unusually quiet, meaning it wasn't turned on and he was just sitting there. It confused me and distracted me from the fact I had neither a suitcase or any idea how long Spencer had waited for me with his laptop open to pretend he was doing something.

“Have a nice weekend, did you?”

“Sure,” I said. “You?”

“It was good. How was your party? I bet your parents guilt-spent ten grand on you.”

His distanced tone was the same as when he gabbled off an answer in chemistry class. The jab about my parents flew right past my head; I was too occupied with the tone of his voice than its contents. With a groan, my back hit the unmade bed, so hard compared to Ryan's that it paralyzed my spine for thirty agonizing seconds where I just lay there and cursed under my breath until Spencer cleared his throat and the horrible, horrible words left his mouth:

“I know you didn't go home. I called your parents' house last night to wish you happy birthday because you weren't answering your cellphone.”

My cellphone. It dug into my ass from underneath my blanket, where I had left it all weekend. I fished it forth with shaky fingers and opened it to the sound of thirteen new text messages, the top one from Pete containing a picture of a bulldog in a birthday hat and nothing else. While the stupid device had chimed in my bed and annoyed the crickets outside, I'd chimed things too embarrassing to admit in the light of day. And there was no way I would tell Spencer that.

He continued: “They said you hadn't been home at all this weekend. They thought you were with me for some reason.” His eyes pierced right through me, and I had a feeling that he read my exact thoughts, which at the moment were nothing but a string of curses intermingled with the occasional flash of Ryan's hipbone, the muscle-strained dent in Ryan's thigh, ryanryanryan. I'd better think about something else.

“Yeah, um.” I stalled to win time. What could get me time? Nothing. I had no choice but to disguise my lies as admitted truths, no matter how weak it made me look. Who cared, we were best friends, right? I opened my mouth and out spilled everything about how my parents canceled my return home in favor of my dad's campaign. I sounded so bitter, I almost believed myself, but the truth was, I didn't care about their approval anymore. Once I thought I strove for it, when all I got was worldly presents and bundles of cash, as if their approval was somehow worth more than that. The truth is, I'd take a thousand dollars over some campy “I'm proud of you, son” any day.

“I'm sorry, man,” said Spencer from the other bed. He looked like he might come over, and I wasn't ready for a big emotional session, where he might hug me and find out I reeked of Ryan, so I shrugged instead, to underline how small of a deal it was. The deal was minuscule. It was the size of a sand grain, of the Grinch's heart, of Levi Daniels' compassion. I told him that, and to make sure he understood how little I cared, I added Ryan's words from Friday night: “if your parents make you feel like a failure, then they've failed as parents. Right?”

Spencer silenced. I didn't expect him to understand anyway; his parents absolutely adored him. Smothered him with hugs and banana pie, which was gross but still homemade. It was just me and Ryan riding the might-as-well-have-been-orphans carrousel. At least being two on the ride was less lonely.

“So I just stayed at school, watched some movies, read that book R– Mr. Ross assigned for tomorrow. Nothing big.”

“It must've been good, since you didn't answer your phone all weekend.”

I narrowed my eyes at him, but he was quite interested in flipping through the pages of the assigned book, which I obviously hadn't read, but I planned to read the summary online. Dear God, don't let Spencer ask me about the book, don't let him ask about the book, don't –

“What's it about?”

My head speeded through all the plot summaries and movies I'd ever watched in hopes of even the tiniest detail to satisfy Spencer's curiosity, which didn't feel so much like curiosity as it felt like a goddamn police interrogation. Sometime during the weekend, Ryan had informed me about the plot, but I had been so mesmerized by the way his mouth moved and how the left corner of it quirked up when he got excited. His eyes lit up and he stumbled over the words, so I listened to the path of his voice more than I listened to him, but it was fine, it was nice, and he stopped talking just to push my hair out of my face and kiss me.

All I had to say was “it's about... life, and stuff. Everyday life. There's these two men, and, well, it's _very_ well written.”

The dinner-bell chimed and called us to the grand hall and the Sunday roast and distracting com-motion of students and faculty. I hoped Spencer would refrain from further questions for a long time, and when he spun up a conversation about SATs, I believed it. I believed everything would stay hidden for ten weeks and I could finish school and be done with all of it.

 

... 

 

The usual gang sat at our usual table, eating the usual meatloaf and everything was dandy until William conspicuously leaned across the table, crooked his finger and motioned for us all to lean in with him.

“You won't believe what I heard at the train station today,” he said lowly. The surrounding tables had stilled and their movements were so awkward, it was obvious they all strained their ears to hear what William talked about. Even the teachers present attempted to hear an extract of our conversation.

“What?” Gabe asked when the tension had lasted for too long. His eyes were so focused on William, his fork missed his mouth and he stabbed himself in the cheek, leaving behind four horizontal purple dots.

“There's this rumor...” William paused to meticulously chew a bite of meat and swallow it with a careful sip of fruit punch. “Rumor going around that the police have begun investigating Mr. Sharp's death again.”

The neighbor table had stopped eating all together. A few of them craned their necks to look at us.

“Why?” Joe asked. None of us ate either, especially not me.

“I don't know, this woman said there was something unnatural about it. But that could mean anything. And as I said –” William shrugged and polished off his plate. “– it's just a rumor, and we live in a small town in case you haven't noticed. People gossip.”

Across the dining hall, someone dropped their tray and shattered a glass and plate on the floor. An ocean of gravy spread across the tiles and the former tray-holder's dusty dress shoes. A kitchen worker rushed over to help Ryan, who was already bent over to pick up the shards along with her. I looked away at the same time as everyone else. I had bigger problems than being caught staring at a teacher's ass, but that didn't mean I needed to pile on top of them.

Slowly people began picking up their forks again, but not me. I stabbed at my steak to make it look like I was eating, but every time I lifted it to my mouth, it tasted of ash. The slob of meat took shape of Peter Sharp's face, accusing me from between half-melted globs of herb butter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if any of you were wondering about ryan's age and the year of the story: i've purposely left that unstated, but i've left little clues throughout the story about when it takes place (hint: the batman movie mentioned in chapter 2 and the somewhat dated technology of our sweet young main character lmao). leave a comment if you've figured it out (or about something else, honestly, the emails from ao3 either improve my day or my writing)


	9. Chapter 9

It's incredible how fast you get to know a person once they've crushed you with the weight of their body; their secrets and their need for reassurance are layered under skin and muscle along with splinters of bone and decade-old scars on the surface and life-long wounds that never heal. Whatever. The point is: sometime between my birthday and the end, I drifted further away from my friends and into the welcoming arms of my English teacher.

This was partly due to the group's constant talk of Sharp's death and the supposed police investigation. With each use of the word 'murder,' my nonchalant mask became a victim of impending slippage. It wasn't murder. Manslaughter at best, but not _murder_. So I burst out laughing with the rest of them, too loud and maniacally at whichever joke they made, even the unfunny ones.

Then came the exam talk. The weekends off school to check out their college dorms and the jabs about Ryan's lectures, but most importantly his clothes and how much of a fag he was.

“Yeah, thank god the teachers don't shower with the students,” a random junior said. Not someone we knew, and because we didn't, all of us called him a homophobe. I even threw a spear of asparagus at him, which resulted in Mr. Carden putting me in detention.

Spencer remained surprisingly silent during these insults, and I often caught him stashing away his phone, even during meals and class and extracurricular activities he had helped arrange.

It reminded me of the congratulatory birthday message Jon had sent me, including a four second video clip of someone's cat blowing a party horn. A month later, it was too late to reply, and sure, I loathed myself for not talking to him, but I had bigger problems.

The rumor of a police investigation haunted my sleep, although occasionally my subconscious liked to bring up the old cane that hung above the door in our classroom as well, which, depending on whether Levi Daniels or Ryan was holding it, decided if it was a nightmare or a wet dream.

All conversation circled about these three subjects: Mr. Sharp, Exams and The Insufferable Teachers at Saint Franklin's Boarding School for Adolescent Boys. The only student I could talk to about something irrelevant such as music or movies, turned out to be Ian. He still came by for laundry, but he had stopped asking Spencer to write his essays. I concluded they had stopped talking too, because whenever Spencer walked in on us, he marched right back outside with the claim that he needed to 'do laundry'.

 

...

 

One Friday when neither of us were home on weekend (Ian was due to leave Saturday morning to the attend the funeral of a relative he had never met), we watched a movie.

He brought a variety of films in a big black case he had for them, organized by genre and title. I searched for the Jason Bourne movie Ian had mentioned so long ago, but found nothing between _Beetlejuice_ and _The Breakfast Club._

“Didn't you say you had The Bourne Supremacy?”

“What? When? I never claimed that,” said Ian, frowning, and maybe he was just lying back then to get our attention; to have an excuse for talking to us. I let it go and flipped absently through the case until my eyes stopped at a familiar name.

“What about this one?”

Ian nodded solemnly. “That's a classic. I know it's from the eighties, but Stephen King's a classic, man. I've been scared of dogs ever since, but I mean, uh, it's just a movie.”

I popped the disc in my laptop, causing the both of us to cover our ears at the high pitched film score that blasted through my battered speakers. With my elbow I dialed down the volume as the red _Cujo_ toned forth on the screen. A smile unwillingly stretched my face.

“What?” Ian smiled nervously and stuffed a piece of candy in his mouth to avoid looking at the screen, where something as terrifying occurred as a huge dog chasing a rabbit. Get it together, Ian.

“Nothing. This movie just reminds me of someone.”

We sat through the awful eighties haircuts and equally awful suspense; despite Ian's claim of the movie being a classic, our attentions drifted away from it.

After a few people had died at the hands of the fictional carnivore, Ian asked “is it hard being a senior?”

“What do you mean?”

“You always study so much. This week, at the tennis court, you weren't there once.”

Right. Because I was at Ryan's place. Not studying.

“SATs, you know. My grades aren't the best, so I need extra tutoring.” I rolled my eyes to show him my disdain for the load of homework.

“But you have Mr. Ross, right? He's not that bad.”

Now was my chance. I could tell Ian about my scandalous affair and have the rumor spread all over school until it seeped into the ears of a teacher, who would tell Levi Daniels, who would suspend both me and Ryan from school. No more homework, no more standardized tests, no more scholastic slavery. But that wouldn't happen, would it?

Saint Franklin's would fire Ryan immediately and I would continue as a student until they had milked my parents of every last penny for my tuition. I would be left alone at lunch and become the laughing stock of not only school but the whole town as well. I would confirm every whisper about Ryan and shatter any respect my classmates had for me. Imagine six weeks with no conversation partners, no friends and nothing to do. How could I have been so stupid as to think screwing my teacher would help _anyone_ in their escape from school? What was my plan, just to live in a motel until summer was over? I had no qualifications whatsoever, no skills, nothing. But here's the thing; here's what makes my whole plan so terrible: I perfectly well knew the consequences and chose to ignore them because it was easier than facing more semesters at the school. It presented a focus and a measure of chucking reality in the trash can.

I still had no qualifications whatsoever, no skills, nothing. I might as well spend my final six weeks at school enjoying them with Ryan.

“No,” I said, “he's not that bad at all.”

Ian leaned back against the wall and together we watched the peak of the movie and the blood-spattered Saint Bernard slaughtering people. Under the blanket next to me, my fingers wrapped around the ridiculous crane machine dog.

A knock on the door interrupted the title menu music from my laptop, and both me and Ian's heads jerked synchronously at the noise.

In came Ryan. He held something in his right hand, but he concealed behind his back it when his eyes fell on Ian.

“Is this a bad time? Because your... I need to talk to you about something.” You could practically hear the free-fall of his composure and its ragged scream when it hit rock-bottom.

“Do you want me to leave?” Ian asked.

Ryan side-eyed me, a wordless of question of when Spencer came back, which could only be answered by whether or not Spencer observed Ian departing our room. Everything was a fucking mess.

That depended on what Ian's innocent sophomore eyes could handle. The upcoming events hardly qualified for a PG-13 rating.

Sure, I could ask him to piss off.

As an omelet flipped on a plate, Ryan wiped the insecurity off his face. He pursed his lips and leaned on the door frame in a supposedly authoritative posture. It only accomplished highlighting the inherent lack of space in his pants. “That last _F_ was nowhere near acceptable, and we need to discuss your attitude toward homework.”

I wrestled down a smile and rolled my eyes at Ian. “We'll talk again tomorrow, yeah?”

Ian slumped off the bed and waddled to the door. The height difference between him and Ryan was almost comical, but even if I wanted to laugh, I was biting down on my tongue too harshly for any sound to escape.

Ryan closed the door behind himself and sat down on the bed. The sweater in his hand used to be black cashmere but now resembled the inside of a vacuum bag.

“You forgot this.” He brushed off a piece of lint but the sweater remained forever ruined. It didn't matter; I had a matching one in my closet and three more at my parents' house, not that I would ever return for them. My mom could just hand them down to the new kid.

Ryan stacked my textbooks on the nearby bureau in a neat, neater, neatest pile. “I see you've broadened your social circle lately.”

Was that jealousy in his voice? I decided to play along. “You think? I haven't noticed anything. Same students, same teachers, same shit.”

“That kid who was just here...”

“Ian,” I offered.

“Yes, Ian. He's in my sophomore English class. He says you two are friends.” Ryan tucked his hands under his thighs and looked down at the fingertips between them, away from me. “Are you? You've never mentioned him.”

Maybe that meant we weren't. I picked up a fresh lint roll and began swiping it down my dusty sweater.

“Not really. Why? Are you jealous,” I teased, nudging him in the ribs. He didn't as much as blink.

“Of course not. I just worry about him. I don't think he's doing too well at home. His grades are dropping too; he used to get _Cs_ but now they're even worse than yours.”

“Because his aunt died?”

Ryan shook his head. “I don't know about that,” he said, “but I think he has an imaginary girlfriend.”

“Why would you think that?” And most importantly, why would Ryan mention it to another student? If not jealousy, perhaps I was just _important_ enough to discuss the matter. But that meant Ian really had no other friends. A few months ago I only acknowledged the money he deposited in my pocket, and while he still bought my old pills, now I gave him curt nods in the hallways and pats on the back during the after-school activities (those I participated in, at least). The new version of Ryan, who dared venture outside of his annex, had apparently picked up on these behaviors, too. That still didn't mean Ian and I were best friends for eternity.

“I had a meeting with his parents a few days ago. They said he did know a girl named Lauren, but she was his old social worker from before they sent him to study here. He's been diagnosed as a compulsive liar, so he's, uh, known to make up friends, and I was concerned whether you two really got along or he made it up. But he didn't. That's good.”

Ryan's monologue no longer seemed directed at me. His hands wrung the arm of my dusty sweater. “I shouldn't have told you all of this, but I worry about him. He's a good kid. Be nice to him.”

“Was that all?” I tried my best not to sound as disappointed as I felt.

Ryan lifted an eyebrow and gestured indecisively. “It kind of was.”

I protested when he got up. “You forgot something.” He still had not removed his tie six hours after the end of the school day, and it flapped in the wind from the fan on my bureau. In the danger zone of Spencer's upcoming arrival, I grabbed the tie and pulled Ryan closer by it.

His lips, soft and surprised, parted for my sake but only relaxed for a second before he retreated with a mumbled “we could get caught”, the coward.

I was without purpose for the remainder of the weekend, without anything but pure undiluted lust for the raspberry glisten on his lower lip. I hadn't cared less about getting caught since the time I stole liquor from Levi Daniels' cabinets. “Can I come over?”

“It's not a good time tonight. I have a lot of papers to grade.”

“So?”

Ryan glanced at the door, then back at me. The fan kept on whirring in the background, and so did the birds and newly arrived cicadas outside. All that noise covered up the footsteps outside the door and just as Ryan's mouth was forming his defeat, the door opened and Spencer returned from his so-called laundry-project without any laundry in his arms.

“What happened to Ian?” he asked.

“He left,” said Ryan, not looking at Spencer, not looking at anything.

Spencer threw himself on his bed. It lamented under his weight and half a dozen school books raced to the floor, knocking over another pile of books. Some of them must have been mine: the ones I borrowed him the day we needed a table for our snacks.

“Sleep tight,” said Ryan to the empty space in the middle of the room, but neither me or Spencer replied, and for the rest of the weekend, I only saw Ryan at meals.

 

...

 

The lack of contact drove me crazy. Blame it on Spencer's new-found desire for helping me cram the material he thought would come up on the SATs. Blame it on the kid who spilled gravy on the floor so I couldn't discreetly pass Ryan's table. Blame it on Mr. Carden and his incessant need for occupying Ryan's space. Sometimes he looked at me funny, and suspicion gnawed at my bones that he knew everything _,_ but then he redirected his attention at his dinner and left me and Ryan to pretend that we didn't care about each other either.

Blame it on the heat that Wednesday gym lesson. Blame it on how fucking boring tennis is when you've played it every P.E. lesson for a whole school year.

The gravel crunched when I spun around, not so gracefully, and slammed the ball to the end of the court with a racket half worn down by the sweat of other people. The threaded handle frizzed and chafed my palm, but I didn't care; the game had absorbed me and I was totally beating Spencer, who looked on the brink of passing out from exhaustion.

Then the gravel stopped crunching and the ball flew right past my ear when I turned to look behind me. There, leaning on the fence and chatting up Mr. Carden was Ryan; Ryan in his wool blazer and tie; Ryan _not_ looking, damn it, why wasn't he?

Spontaneously I yanked up my mandatory gym t-shirt and twisted the hem around the neckline. The rest of it was drenched in sweat and sweat ran down my back in small, gross rivulets, but it worked. It worked because Ryan was about to leave, but now he stayed to talk about the weather, of all things. Hey, it was hot, but no hotter than any other day, nothing out of the ordinary. Good, I got him staring.

Mr. Garnett yelled across the court, “did you go into menopause already, Urie? You're sweating like my mom when she sunbathes.” The ball he threw at me, I caught easily.

“No sir, it's just hot, that's all.”

Garnett was the only teacher who demanded the 'sir' suffix, agreeably a leftover from his time in the army. His biceps were green from old ink and bulged out like the clouds above us.

I became very aware of the length of the mandatory gym shorts, and the way they rode up my legs when I jumped to smash the ball to the other end of the court. The only good thing about that was how Ryan noticed, too; his conversation about cirrostratus clouds stilled while he unlocked his briefcase and innocently loosened his tie. Mr. Carden started talking about the Sovjiet Union and Ryan clearly wasn't listening. I felt his gaze mix with the sweat that crawled down the hamstrings of my legs.

The shorts were all the same size, which didn't explain why I felt so exposed. In the past year I never minded them once, but as I bent forward and served the ball, Ryan gobbled up the sight like one of his red velvet ice cream pints.

Before I knew it, Garnett dismissed the class with a shrill whistle. His bear claw of a hand lashed down on both me and Spencer's backs. The only difference was that I sported a beginning sunburn and Spencer didn't. “Smith. Urie. Well played, both of you.”

Spencer muttered something about my mental absence for the last set. “You coming?” he called over his shoulder, shuffling off to the showers.

I shook my head and stayed behind, picking up stray tennis balls and hurling them into the container behind the net. Mr. Carden had left and the crunching gravel informed me that Ryan was leaving, too.

If I called out “wait,” someone might think I meant it for them, but if I didn't, me losing the tennis match and strutting around throughout the last half of class would all have been for nothing, so I dashed through the gates and down a corridor. I followed Ryan until my sporadic running practice caught up with him.

“Do you always show off like that during gym class?” Though his voice sounded the same, toneless even, only a thin ring of brown encircled his pupils, and the skin above his shirt was flushed from anything but the sun.

My eyes darted from the knot in his tie to the wall and the courtyard of students below. As if water, my planned seduction techniques evaporated under the sun, and all that remained was an awkward boy in yellow gym shorts.

“Don't taunt me like that in public,” he warned. A cloud drifted past and shadowed his face and the hand reaching out to tug my knotted t-shirt apart. Two small steps backward and my back met nothing but wall. No curiosity burned from the yard, and like the sky my eyes darkened, too. My voice was a foreign kind of honey-slick and sticky when I hovered at Ryan's ear to tease the shell of it with my tongue. “You have no idea how obvious you are.”

“Thank you, sir. I try my best.”

I had Ryan trapped against the wall, useless except for his hands that slid down my back and below the waistline of my shorts.

“I wish,” he panted, “fuck, I wish you'd try that hard in _my_ classes.”

Naturally I hooked a leg around his hip, fastened my mouth to his neck and acknowledged I shouldn't do all that in the middle of the corridor.

“Yeah? Where else do you want to try –” Everything tightened: Ryan's hands and his teeth clamping down on my earlobe, the warmth in my gut, the fear of a student or teacher passing and the reality that someone might.

“– harder?” I finished, “where do you want me harder? Is there something unsatisfying about my oral performances? I thought you loved blowjobs. You sound like you love them.”

I squeezed him through his pants, bit lightly at his neck. “You _feel_ like you love them; you feel like you want me to get down on my knees right now and suck your dick until you can't walk. Do you want that?”

His fingers inched along the waistline of the shorts, leaving crescents from his nails and stars on the back of my eyelids, no more teasing, just a groaning mess of _fuck me fuck me fuck me_.He could, in the middle of the damned corridor, and I'd love it. Need it even. As much as the air in my lungs and his tongue in my mouth.

And in the middle of this, shoes echoed against the walls of the gallery and Ryan pushed me into a niche in the opposite wall. He held his briefcase discreetly over his pants and nodded politely at headmaster Daniels, who strutted past to acquire a piece of lasagna in the canteen.

“Come join me,” said the headmaster. When he turned his head stiffly forward, Ryan mouthed a “later” at me in the shadows of the niche.

 

...

All the times like this, in the middle of corridors and in the back of the matinee during class, I would rub the outside of his pants as important scenes rolled over the screen, and everyone else busied themselves with taking notes, even Spencer, who had seen most of the movies before. Ryan forebade blowjobs; he claimed that I had to watch the movie like everybody else, but we both knew he only picked those movies so we could have a little privacy. We were so addicted, not even ninety minutes of Twentieth Century Classics could tear us apart. I should stop, but of its own volition, my hand ventured up his thigh and the delicious hitch in his breathing was the sweetest sound I ever heard.

So much more reason for him to cuss me out the classes without movies, to ignore me and growl at me when I did even the slightest thing wrong. I understood, I played along, but each time he spat “do your damned homework, Urie,” my heart sank another inch in my chest. It was bound to end up in my feet one day if he kept it up. He was right, but I forgot my homework because I was with _him;_ didn't that matter? But no matter how much he murmured _“_ Brendon _”_ into my ribs in the evening, during class I was good ol' stupid Urie with the attention span of a goldfish with Alzheimer.

With all these incidents, I was bound to crack one day. And I did, in the most pathetic way imaginable. I ditched the others and lunch, even though I hadn't eaten all day. I ached with the need for escape, to get out of the seemingly shrinking classroom and the dreadful school itself. I headed straight for the nearest bathroom, pushed confused freshmen out of my way and slammed the door behind me. The face in the toothpaste speckled mirror stared back at me, heaving, its eyes glossy like hard-boiled eggs.

Ryan's voice sounded in my head, not the gentle version, but a rough sneer of “are you completely incapable of paying attention for ten seconds?”

Snickering, snickering, always snickering.

Despite being out of the classroom and away from the mockery, I winced. He no longer towered over my desk. There was no desk; there were only mint green tiles and a pool of urine in the far corner next to the pissoir.

Spencer, exasperated: “Come on, just read the passage so we can finish this.”

Me, fighting to concentrate on the text instead of the annoying bee that buzzed around my head and Joe smacking his gum to my right. “I read it already, I just can't... what's that professor's name again?”

“Collins,” Spencer sighed, “Mary Collins.”

Ryan leaned on the table, mostly toward Spencer and the open book on his table. He scoffed at my empty desk and said “trouble with the assignment” with a mock little question mark at the end, even if he perfectly well knew I couldn't remember any of the shit in that article, and if we were alone he would have stroked my back and said “we'll take it easy, okay?”

In the bathroom, a rat dashed across the floor, right past my feet. Headed to my usual stall, the third, I opened the door and stumbled onto the toilet lid. I drew up my feet underneath myself, curled around my legs as if I could compress myself to take up less space, slink into the background and never be yelled at again.

“You really can't work with other people, can you? You just slow them down,” said the echo of Ryan's voice, slam, three slaps and an uppercut to my face. No apology followed, just brutally honest silence. _You slow them down Urie, 'cause you're slow and you're stupid and even the teacher you're screwing thinks so._

Something patted on the floor outside my stall. The rat? But rats couldn't open doors, and that was definitely the sound of hinges. When the bathroom door opened, my organs tried to escape through my throat. I froze on the toilet seat, staring at the unlocked latch, and prayed that the unknown visitor wouldn't choose my stall.

My classmates, seniors. The sound of a zipper, piss sprayed against porcelain (and probably everywhere else), then William's voice:

“At first I was cool with it, I mean, he's a good guy and all, but with exams in a month, I'm just praying Ross doesn't pair us up. Every class I'm like 'not Brendon, not Brendon, not Brendon,' you know?”

“Yeah, I know. I'm not saying he's stupid, just... English's not really his subject.”

Gabe. Okay then.

“I don't think he has a subject.” Muffled laughter. They zipped their pants again. The door clacked, without either of them washing their hands, but I was the one feeling dirty. Dried substances spattered the green walls around me. Between them, years of students had keyed in claims of who in town gave the best head. _Martha L_ _ew_ _is '03_ , _Jac Vanek '94_ , even an ancient _Melissa_ _Cave '35_ that I had carved in there as a joke last year.

Five minutes before class had ended, Ryan had been leaning on my table again, but this time Spencer was collaborating with Patrick and I had forgotten the name of the professor for the thirty first time that period.

“Still not working? You're not even trying,” Ryan said, loud enough for everyone to hear.

I had no witty reply or reasonable justification, just a lump in my throat as a result of all the analyses and textbook material mushed together in there like peanut butter. When I reached up inside the bathroom stall, the lump was still there. Crying wouldn't help, so why did everything blur and my nails dig into my palms like it could stop the pathetic tears from streaming down my face. My friends would all make fun of me, more than usual, to my face even, if they knew I cried over being scolded by a teacher _in_ _y_ _our senior year,_ _god, what's wrong with you, you're so pathetic_.

The door opened again, different footsteps. It sounded exactly like someone hammered Greta's multicolored bricks onto the bathroom tiles, and I recognized the steps and the ridiculous heeled shoes like my own voice.

“Brendon? Are you in here?”

A strong desire to shout “no, fuck off” welled up in me, but even if I did yell, my voice would crack, so I bit my lip and shut up. The door pushed open, followed by Ryan peaking behind it. I buried my face in the gap between my knees and stomach, praying he wouldn't touch me and hoping he would.

“What's wrong?”

“Fuck off.” There it came, a big wad of snot and detestation. Not the desired marking of my territory, which was absurd anyway, because who wanted their kingdom to be a minuscule stall in the boys' lavatories?

“Look, the things I said...”

“No, you're right.” I inhaled more tears and mucus. If I looked up, last night was bound to be the last time Ryan knelt before me with eyes that showed anything but pity. _You slow them down, you're hopeless, you don't even try, you're stupid, never get anywhere in life, stupid, stupid Brendon with_ _your_ _blood-red_ F _s and gloomy_ E _s._

He sighed. “That doesn't give me any right to humiliate you in front of the class. I don't know why I did that.”

So no one suspects how nice you really are to me, so no one knows why your knees are filled with carpet lint, so I'm still your dirty little secret, not the reason you got fired. Again. I got it.

“You look kind of miserable on that toilet seat.” Ryan reached out his hand, and when I ceased to grab it, he snaked an arm around my back and under my armpit before he hoisted me up with great inelegance. “Come on, we have to feed you some lunch.”

“Don't wanna go into the hall,” I slurred, “there's people.”

Reluctantly I inclined on the arm that held me upright and resisted wiping my nose in his sleeve.

“I have a TV dinner in my fridge. Peas and stew. You can eat with me.”

We walked in silence for the rest of the way, only pulling apart when someone passed. Ryan wore his “sorry, sick student” face, and I already felt like a glob of vomit, so looking the part came easy.

Outside the annex, I lapsed on his shoulder while he unlocked the door. He wrenched himself out of my grip and pulled me into the leftover seventies furniture and smell of books, into a safe haven behind shielding curtains and into a kiss.

 

...

 

I stayed in the annex throughout the afternoon and into the evening. We ate in front of the turned-off television and talked about sex (“wouldn't it be hot if we did it in the headmaster's office?”), drugs (“Spencer sells _what_?!”) and rock'n'roll. (“I found this album in my room, you should totally listen to it” followed by a half exhausted, half affectionate “When? You're always here, occupying my time and space”).

Each hour gobbled up a bite of the next one, and in the early night hours of Tuesday, I was lying in Ryan's bed again.

Ryan got up from the bed too soon for my taste. I was still warm and spent. At the first creak of the floorboards, I anxiously awaited the soft words “It's time for you to go now.” They never came. He claimed he had to use the bathroom, but there were no sounds of running water, and I was alone with my breathing in the claustrophobic bedroom. Every part of me ached: my back, my thighs and my chest like cavities in teeth rotting from too much candy.

Too much sweet, fingers too interlocked, the span between then and Ryan rushing out of bed too short. Too little daytime together save from the two times forty five minutes of lecturing, which wasn't even directed at me.

In the night he was always so _rough_ with me. His sharp hipbones dug into my loin, he panted “can I?” and his hands tangled in my hair before I ever consented to let him pull it. Looking at the pillow next to me, three or four dark strands glinted in the moonlight.

He returned with something in his hands, but my focus landed on his thighs instead. They bore my small teethmarks, and he walked like he hadn't noticed or cared. The sight filled me with pride and immeasurable sadness at the same time.

The thing in his hands was his portable CD player with a tangled cord around it. I took it in my hands and inspected its dents.

“You have one of these? Are you eleven?”

Ryan looked anything but phased at my outburst. He smiled down at his thighs and rubbed one of the bite marks.

“We can't all afford fancy electronic gear, you know. It works; it plays music. What do you want to listen to?”

“Dunno. Whatever you want.” I rolled off the mattress and let my body drag across the floor, which should have been cold, but everything in a two hundred mile radius was an even hundred degrees, even me and Ryan. We both had to be up in five hours in our respective residences, so the natural choice was to sit here and not sleep.

The discs popped up everywhere: between book pages and behind the limp ties on chairs, empty plastic folders and CD's out of their covers. On our way in here we'd stepped on at least a dozen. Ryan resembled a toddler among his lost toys. He piled all the halves and thirds to his left in a glittering pile until he found his desired item.

I patted the marshmallow-y mattress, and it wheezed as he compressed himself to fit on it.

Four hours and forty eight minutes. I had to say something. It was night time; you said things at night that you had no opportunity to say in the day when students flocked around you at all hours and forced you to joke about your teacher being a pedophile. Night meant truth, revelations behind the diners. You sneaked around like the bag ladies who shopped under the cover of darkness, too ashamed to be seen in the day. Bud Weisers and fist fights and domestic abuse, Tom Conrad and his drug business, and the tumbleweeds in flight down the safe darkness of Main Street.

Ryan placed one earplug in my ear and one in his own. The device clicked and hummed and I had to say something before the music began.

“You're so out of place.” _How poetic, Brendon. Should've kept your mouth shut._

He turned to me, one half of his face lit up in blues by the moonlight. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you should be somewhere else. Like, New York or something. Not teaching at this school forever. You said it yourself; it's headed to the fifth layer of hell.”

Entire empires could have risen and fallen in the time it took him to reply, and when he did, he just said “it's my job” in a distant voice. He turned away again and only the outline of his profile was blue; the rest was black.

“Are you still gonna teach here next year?” I asked, my voice frantic and a little broken. A wire or something inside my brain snapped at the sight of the calendar on the wall. It seemed to laugh at me with its evidence of the fact that in less than six weeks I was moving out on my own with no college spot secured and no job and probably none of my old friends left, and definitely not my parents left, not with them and their new kid and oh god now my breathing outpaced the bassline and the drum of my pulse. Calm, calm, calm. My fingers scrambled between us and the cord until I found his. I didn't hold his hand or anything, but just knowing he was there comforted me.

“Probably. This place has actually grown on me.”

Eventually he took my hand, and we must've fallen asleep like that because the rising sun woke me an hour later. Our fingers were still loosely clasped together, and the profile of his face now outlined golden by the sun, his mouth open and drooling on the pillow, his honey-coloured lashes fluttering in deep sleep.

In that moment the freight train of reality hit me, violent but soundless, loaded with the realization, no the _fact_ that I was madly, recklessly in love with him and the idea of escaping with him and living in a one-room apartment like equals. The two of us on a pinstriped mattress, at a breakfast table with orange juice, in the middle of the street holding hands without hiding. I could get a job in a record store or wait tables outside of classes, should I manage to get into college after all. Ryan could work somewhere he was truly happy, not at this hellhole of a boarding school or my hypothesized college, or any college; he could write books and we could both sit in that ridiculously small apartment with coffee gone cold on the table, typing on our respective laptops. We could have plants that didn't die because we were two people to water them. As I twisted my hand from his, picked up my clothes and tripped out of the room, I wished I could rewind a few hours back and have it be always night. I wished he hadn't said that about liking Saint Franklin's. It had to be a joke, right? No one, not even the headmaster, liked being here. Of course it was a joke.

Ryan cracked open one eye at me and muttered “you have to go back to your own room now,” as I forced my departure from the small bedroom. I don't think he even knew what time it was or how little it mattered if I left because Spencer had probably already woken up.

 

The moment I had slipped underneath my covers, Spencer's alarm rang and I let go of a sigh of relief I didn't know I had held onto since I left the annex.

 

...

First in June, mere daysbefore the SATs, headmaster Daniels decided to live up to his pamphlet alter ego and its statements about 'an abundance of after school activities' and 'fun-filled field trips.' While I devoured my roast beef sandwich, he stood up in the dining hall and bellowed “students, we're leaving the premises tomorrow.”

Cue screams of juvenile excitement. Cue balloons and confetti. Cue disco balls and strobe lights and sparklers in a big seizure-inducing mess of celebration. But nothing half as interesting as what Ryan informed me later that afternoon inside one of the mint green bathrooms. A teacher and a student, both washing their hands after taking a piss, coincidentally in the same bathroom without anyone else present. Perfectly ordinary.

“What's with the field trip?”

Ryan zipped his pants and eyed the door anxiously. “Look, don't tell anyone I said this. I just think it's ridiculous for the board to hide this from you. You're old enough to know, most of you anyway, but the police are investigating Sharp's death, and us, well, the other teachers agreed it would probably be for the better if you didn't find out about it. I should have said –”

He went on and on and all I did was stand there, paralyzed. Only when he paused to look at me for an answer did I manage to stammer “who, I mean why would they do that? I thought it was an accident.”

“Apparently the police think the opposite. I wouldn't know, I never met the man. We're taking you to that house in Flagstaff for the annual trip.”

Under any other circumstance I would have laughed. Please. Which house? What annual trip? All two hundred and forty students left? Nothing remotely exciting had ever taken place under the directory of Levi Daniels, let alone a few days off school. As it was, I barely managed to keep my legs from giving up under me as we waited for someone to enter the bathroom. I held onto the rim of a cracked sink to stabilize myself while Ryan reeled on about the school economy and what a great chance it was to unite the classes.

“Think of it as your early graduation party. It's only for twenty four hours while the police search Sharp's old annex and the rest of school grounds.” He said more but my ears felt as though someone had stuffed them full of cotton balls, as did my mouth when I tried to speak.

So I didn't. I kissed Ryan in the middle of the bathroom while someone else flushed the toilet inside their stall.

 

I don't know how we made it to the annex without my body collapsing. Ryan paced ahead twenty steps in front of me, desperate to erase any evidence of the singular innocent bathroom kiss, and I continuously steadied myself against walls and railings on the way. Images of Sharp's coffin flashed through my head: Sharp's coffin, the lake, Sharp's coffin, Sharp's face, Spencer, a police cell, Jon's face, a newspaper headline, Sharp's coffin, police cells, courtrooms, headlines headlines headlines, for some reason the disappointed faces of my parents, then Spencer and finally a click and nothing but pitch black. The visual reel had stopped, but my emotions still repeated themselves: from panic to frenzy to anxiety and a sudden demand for death and destruction, though I wasn't certain of whose death that would be.

I had to think about something else. With the SATs less than a week away, I was well aware this something ought to be studying. I should cram mathematical formulas and grammar rules, and oh god I really should learn when to use who and whom, and in reality Ryan ought to help me with this, which I'm sure he wanted to, but since I forgot my books in my room, we ended up making out on the couch, with the door securely locked and his hand securely locked in my pants.

Given that there were less than two weeks left before my departure home, or my departure anywhere I wanted to go after finishing high school, I ought to think about that, too. Hell, I ought to think about the only thing going on at the moment (the callouses on Ryan's fingertips, his mouth sucking bruises on my collarbone) but instead I was subjected to the war that waged within my head.

In one corner of the ring, we had up-and-coming, rational Brendon with great arguments such as _Relax, they won't find out. It's been months since the accident, there'll be no evidence left._

In the opposing corner we had the state champion, four times gold winner: the state of panic that usually occurred before a test, only quadrupled, deprived of sleep and food, and injected with a pint of adrenaline, going _you'll end up in jail, that's what'll happen, you drop out of high school and you get twelve years in jail for manslaughter and it won't matter that it was an accident, you fucking killed your goddamn teacher and you need to leave_ now.

The rational part of me pounded to its limits with the gloves on: _what evidence would there be anyway? That's right, none. So calm down. The boat crashed, it's rotting on the bottom of the lake and no one knows why but you and Spencer, and he hasn't told anyone. Has he? Why would he do that. He didn't do that. Of course he didn't_

only interrupted by Ryan, who stilled and asked “is there something wrong?”

I should tell him, I really should, but in the bottomless pit of despair, the boxing ring, the vortex of guilt in my head, I discovered not even a morsel of courage. So I pushed him back against the couch and resumed my studied position on the floor. With my uniform slacks down at my ankles, the rough carpet scratched my knees in a familiar way that brought me closer to earth. Resumed positions: Ryan with his head lolled back and jittery legs, me between them with my hands braced on his thighs and my arms locked in a strange position due to my uniform blazer.

Imagine the scenario: Ryan's dick was lodged in my throat and one of his hands was grabbing fistfuls of my hair, pulling me closer and closer until I gagged and tears welled up in my eyes. The other hand stroked my slightly sunburned neck in soothing motions. My anxiety finally dissolved under his vocal appreciation, and in the middle of this bliss, headmaster Daniels shattered the precious illusion with a voice so nasal, it audibly dripped with mucus: “Can you spare a minute?”

In a half-strangled voice, Ryan called “coming” toward the door, and as he let go of my skull so quickly that my head yanked back at the lack of pressure, he did. The school crest on the lapel of my blazer was now inconceivable by sticky white fluid. Outside the door Daniels rattled an unnerving set of keys. Ryan bounced off the couch, then simultaneously zipped his pants and unlocked the door.

Unsure of what to do, I shrugged out of the blazer and stuffed it in the crack between two couch cushions. I covered it with a pillow and paced around the living room, thinking about maggots and carrot soup as if that might lessen the physical evidence. Daniels' voice and the sudden appearance of his face in the door frame turned out to work miracles for that sort of thing, but a quick glance in the mirror informed me that my mouth was still obscenely swollen, and the left underside of my jaw glistened with saliva. Daniels, however, seemed oblivious to the state of me, and instead focused his attention on a quiet but serious conversation with Ryan.

The latter shot me a look and gesturedat the door. _Leave_. So I packed my erratic heart and anxious beads of sweat and scuffled through it, not looking back, but without a plan for my future either.

 

...

 

Back in our room, Spencer was packing a light suitcase for the trip. Despite Ryan's admonishing I told him about the upcoming investigation and aided him in concealing the last batch of Tom Conrad's junk from the police. In case they brought dogs, we were probably screwed, so Spencer decided it was better to bring the whole lot with him. It wasn't much. The alcohol was gone, sold to a group of sophomores whose leader had recently broken up with his girlfriend back at home, so the only things left were three bottles of pills and two small bags of weed. Enough to sell in the remaining time left of school, enough for the police to warrant an interrogation and jeopardize Spencer's future. And mine too, though I had bigger problems than a few recreational drugs.

“Don't worry, they probably won't search the students' rooms,” I said.

Spencer frowned from his position on the floor, with his whole arm under his bed, shuffling around for the last bottle of pills. “If they search any room, it's ours, and you know why.”

I wet my lips and tasted Ryan. “They're not. They have no clues.”

“Then how come they're investigating? How come you even _know_ this?”

“Overheard it in the bathroom,” I lied. “Why do you think this whole Flagstaff trip's going on in the first place?”

“Fair,” said Spencer and pushed himself off the dusty floorboards. Half of his suitcases were already packed, not for the Flagstaff lodge, but for his return home. Mine were still strewn across the floor, as were my thoughts and possible destinations for the next months of my life.

I should say something or strike up a goodbye speech to him, but the right words probably hid between my laundry and the suitcases, and I was too distressed to search for them.

 


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hohoho and a happy 1st of December. I'm trying to put together a christmas fic unless school kills me before the holidays.

You could count the bus rides of my life on two hands, and while all of them had been the same awful bumpy hours in a dusty vehicle accompanied by the racket of other students and the distinct bouquet of farts and lunches stewing in a hundred and ten degrees, none had been as insufferable as the ride to Flagstaff.

Five battered buses departed from the gravel outside Saint Franklin's at nine in the morning. Logic would have been to shovel us into one bus for each year and one for the teachers, but instead Mr. Garnett blew his whistle and we all stormed toward the cleanliest one and attempted to squash all of our backpacks in along with us. The most intelligent soon realized the logistics were impossible and slumped against the side of the nearest vehicle.

My eyes strained in the dusty aftermath to find Ryan somewhere in the crowd. It should have been easy, what with his height and interesting choices of headdress and shades, but the crowd pushed me toward a wreck steered by a balding driver with the same countenance of despair you might notice in prison inmates. Sweat-flowers bloomed in his armpits, alerting me to but not preparing me for the wall of heat inside the bus. Where to sit, Gabe, William, I don't know you, this seat's taken, sorry, Patrick, Pete, I never talk to that guy, where is Spencer, why is this bus full of freshmen, finally Ian on the backseat with his red backpack on his lap.

Two miles away from the school, the driver blasted both the stereo and the air condition at full power. Two miles onto Interstate 17, the ventilation crashed but _Greatest of The Eighties_ continued to fill the bus and rendered any private conversation impossible. I'm not sure I would have told Ian about the police investigation, or maybe I would, given how the subject he veered into was even more painful.

“I can't believe you only have nine days left of high school. Isn't that awesome?”

“It's weird,” I said, “I can't get used to it.”

“But college will be fun, right? Where are you going anyway, you haven't told me yet.”

Nowhere. I was going absolutely nowhere in my life, except maybe prison and questionably hell. Snapshots of Spencer's college pamphlets and my own rejected letters flickered through my mind in a presentation of what could have been and never would be. “Um, Dartmouth,” I lied.

“That's so cool, Lauren's going there too.”

At least neither of us were honest with each other. Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered any more . The radio blasted Van Halen's  _ Hot for Teacher.  _ I tried not to laugh or cry at the irony. The police investigation overshadowed everything. At the moment some officer and his dog were probably ransacking our room and discovering a dust speck that lead to someone's downfall. The slightest thing could trigger further investigation of me. If Spencer had discussed the matter with Jon and left his phone behind, they would find it and find out.  The  thought was too horrible to bear, yet I  held onto it like a security blanket.

Maybe if I just went to the police station and told the truth, went down there and plainly stated “it was my fault, kind of.”

Maybe if I begged them not to throw me in jail.

Maybe if I just paid a large enough fee, maybe because I was underage when it happened, maybe maybe maybe.

Maybe I should just stay in Flagstaff and rekindle my life up there.

I stared out the window and held onto my own bag, which contained little else than a toothbrush and Spencer's weed. It wouldn't work, because I had left all my money back at the school, including the abnormally generous check my parents had sent me as a lousy excuse for an eighteenth birthday. The envelope also contained a sleek new cellphone that looked like something from a science fiction movie, so impossibly small I could shield it completely in the palm of my hand. I felt a strong urge to crush it under my boots, but I had to admit it came in useful to own a phone.

Ian interrupted the flow and ebb of despair. His quiet voice next to me, like a small kid tugging on my sleeve, said “I'll miss you when you leave, you know.”

He really shouldn't, because the truth is that I was an awful person and he only put up with me because he was so socially leached. “You can have my phone number,” someone said. It must have been me; none of the other passengers on the bus acknowledged us in the back seat apart from the spare over-the-back glance and the quirked eyebrow of “why are you suddenly hanging out with  _ him _ ”.  S adly I no longer recognized whether it was directed at me or Ian.

I typed it into his three year old cellphone and continued my fixation on the landscape. Cactuses after cactuses turned into leafier vegetation until some nerdy sophomore pointing out that “it's called cacti, people. How on earth will you get into college when you don't know these things. I weep for humanity.”

Ian talked about summer. About Lauren and their trip together abroad. The Seine. Patisseries, cobblestone inclinations and small charming alleys. Cafés, poorly enunciated french, _leh toor dehs I fell_ , how well she spoke the language, how much he adored her.

“Sji tame, that's all I know. She'll do most of the talking. She speaks french like a native Parisian. Her parents are part french,” he said. The same dreamy expression plastered his face from Black Canyon City to exit 326, Willard Spring's Road.

“That's wonderful,” I said in my strange absent voice. Lauren had never existed at all, but I couldn't bring myself to care. The darkest, most morbid part of me was dancing around the edges of my downfall: the sniffer dogs, the crack in the floor that widened into a canyon below my feet and the big black nothing I could do about it. The same part put me in the same chic café as Ian and his elusive girlfriend, where an imagined Ryan fed me chunks of baguette, and everything was wonderful before the pavement cracked and I fell into the underground abyss, Ryan and Ian on the edge throwing bread at me still like that might help me out. I blinked and I was back in the bus, Ian next to me chewing gum and humming along to the music.

Finally we drove off the interstate and onto the grounds of the infamous Flagstaff Lodge, in the midst of what I think is referred to as a grove. It looked like a jungle to me, but after two and a half hours in a bus, stepping into it felt like the north pole.

 

...

 

If you've ever wondered what filthy rich kids do when on a field trip; if you've ever wondered if our teachers force us to sleep in silk tents and toast s'mores on silver spears, then you're not entirely wrong. The teachers surprised us all with having enabled a variety of physical exercises. Most of the students hardly completed half of them due to the frosty temperatures in Flagstaff. After two hours of a cruelly biased baseball game and an impossibly unlawful relay race, everyone were quivering as they walked around in only double digits for the first time in months, blue-lipped and muttering about the need for a furnace and a cup of hot cocoa. The effort poured into the twenty four hours we spent in that so-called lodge actually impressed me. The teachers almost fooled me into thinking that this was not a desperate getaway to conceal the crumbling foundation beneath Saint Franklin's, and they certainly fooled everyone else.

The lodge, or lodge _ s _ , really, consisted of a group of buildings divided into a common room in two stories, an adjacent kitchen and four large dormitories, each with a bathroom and shutters over every window, even the tiny top ones that no one ever opened. The walls, ceilings, floors, furniture, even the roofs had been built out of red cedar. Everywhere you turned, the same clay-colored logs laughed in your face with  intricate patterns and words of wisdom carved into them. Clashing chandeliers drooped from the ceiling (really, which aesthetically impaired interior decorator believed  _ that _ to be a good idea?) and meter-high paintings of men with mustaches adorned those of the walls that were not covered by bear skin, like this was some kind of Alaskan hunter cabin, not a fancy hideaway for boarding school students.

 

Around nine in the evening teachers Carden, Garnett and Ross brought out a bathtub worth of crackers and marshmallows to the campside. At first Ryan attempted to light a fire with two sticks of bread, but it only resulted in a dent on his forehead. Still, he laughed at the situation and handed a lighter to Mr. Garnett, who ignored the neat assortments of twigs and branches and the pile of old newspapers next to the logs of firewood. Instead he poured at least half a gallon of gasoline into one of the bonfire squares and threw three logs on top of it.

The flames roared and sizzled off a few leaves in the trees atop of us. The crackling soothed most of the two hundred students into a comatose state of relaxation, and so we all quieted down for a few hours, reduced to mumbling messes of burnt marshmallow and chocolate smeared chins, because apparently every Saint Franklin's student consumed their food like stone age brutes.

A bit before midnight  we retreated into the common room where  someone slapped a video tape of  _ Ferris Bueller _ into the VCR only to discover thirty minutes into the movie  that  someone had taped it over with porn. Someone, whose voice sounded an awful lot like Gabe, shouted “just keep it going” at the exact same time as the woman on the screen. That finally proved too much for headmaster  Daniels. He strode in front of the  television  and called for us to “go to the dormitories, thank you.”

Imagine about two hundred teenage boys pissing and brushing their teeth at the same time in the same four bathrooms (two of those reserved for girls and undoubtedly ruined for the next batch of visitors, no matter how many hours we had to scrub them the following morning). The scenario was pretty much the same as feeding hours in the monkey cage at any major zoo.

 

Not until half past two in the morning did our dormitory settle down, but I was still awake and in these early morning hours I tossed and turned underneath my provided blankets.

German shepherd dogs filled my brain with their pointy noses, sniffing through my possessions. Yellow 'caution' tape, my stash of bills discovered and confiscated. The floor-level mattress underneath me felt as brick-like as the one in a detention cell. My stomach twisted into a tight knot at the thought that I might spend unnumbered nights on such a thing, _you have the right to remain silent, Mr. Urie, but I suggest you speak up about why we found evidence that you killed poor, innocent Peter Sharp._

I'm not hard-shelled. I would crumble under that pressure, in fact I already heard the sound of ice cracking from my hallucinated interrogation.

Outside the shutters the sun would soon rise. Sleep was futile, so I grabbed my jacket from the bag at the foot of the bed, lifted the thin blanket and stepped onto the wooden floorboards. Unbeknownst to which ones creaked, I thread as cautiously as possible. Somewhere in the dark, someone turned in their bed. A pair of eyeballs lit up briefly in fluorescent white at the level of my knee, and I jerked in the middle of the room, nearly knocking over a pair of boots.

It's okay, I told myself, I'll pretend I have to use the bathroom. No revealing sliver of yellow woke any more people, and I didn't dare switch on any lights in the dormitory or the corridor, so with my palms for guidance along the wall, I inched across the already smutty tiles to the double doors at the end and into the pale night.

A lone figured was perched on the thick wooden railing in front of the lodge. The long straws of dewy grass moistened my calves, and their swishes alerted him to my presence.

“I can't sleep,” we said simultaneously.

Then, me: “do you want to take a walk or something?” I threw my head in the direction of the forest. He nodded and followed me along the path. Wood chips covered the first part, but then whoever was hired to clear the residence and surrounding areas had probably tired of keeping up appearances and sat down for a beer instead of finishing. And because of this guy I kept stumbling over roots and rocks and clasped Ryan's sleeve for support. He seemed annoyed by this, though I couldn't tell if his sighs were due to exhaustion from the hiking or from dragging me along. But when I fell over yet another loose root and nearly smashed my face into the soil, he took my hand after all and said something about my age being too young for a walking cane.

The ground soon emptied of fallen pine cones, and the farther we ventured from the lodge, the deeper the forest enveloped us both in silence. The fuller the silence, the louder the thoughts inside my head. Every crack of a branch or hoot of some kind of owl had me snapping my neck in that direction to ascertain it wasn't a police officer.

“Why are you so tense?”

“I'm not,” I lied. “I'm fine.” A break in the clusters of trees showed a horizontal tree trunk, covered in moss and overlooking the area we came from. I followed him out there until we saw the lodges, swept in pastel blues and surrounded by miles and miles of spruces. The road we came from was a mere curl in the landscape; the buses resembled matchboxes and the moon a thin slice among, christ, I'd never seen that many stars before. The sky wasn't even blue anymore; it was a dotted coruscating silver so vast that _I_ felt the size of a matchbox.

“They're pretty,” I said, out of breath from either the hike or the sky; I didn't know which.

“You're standing underneath perhaps the greatest natural phenomenon known to mankind and all you have to say about it is 'pretty'?” Ryan clicked his tongue, and the light fell through one of the pines and on the sloppy crescent of his mouth. On his slightly upturned nose, the constellations of freckles. His eyes turned away from the greatest natural phenomenon known to mankind, instead looking at me.

Unaware of how to compliment either the stars or his attention, I said “I just like looking at them.”

“I still can't believe we dragged you out here. You should be at home cramming your curriculum. That investigation is ridiculous, it was obviously an accident and all it serves to do is distract the police from the actual crimes that happen around here.”

He stared at the lodges below and the people inside them: asleep, completely unaware of the crimes committed all around them.

What would he think of me if he knew? Sometimes I could hardly stand myself for what I'd done; sometimes it was only an accident. A spilled glass of juice, a shattered window. The end of another human's life. I stared at Ryan's face, the boredom in his languid picking apart a pine cone. I weighed the chances of his hands never touching me again if he knew, I weighed those up against a hug of consolation. A soft “it wasn't your fault.” Escape from responsibility for just a moment. I could sling the whole incident off the slope like Ryan tossed the pine cone, and maybe it never happened. Sharp either existed somewhere else or had never done at all. I kept thinking these thoughts over and over again.

Ryan opened his mouth to say something at the same time as I blurted out “it was my fault.” The admission was so loud, so sudden and so fucking stupid of me. It was the loose thread in my favorite sweater, and I had just tugged at it and now the whole garment was in danger of unraveling.

“What do you mean?” he said slowly. “What do you mean it's your fault?”

Already then I think he knew. There was a flicker of anxiety in his dying smile, a twitch at the probable notion that I'd flat out stabbed Sharp with a butcher's knife in an outrage over homework, and now he was alone with me in a dark forest. I had to annul that thought,

_ you shouldn't have said anything, you're stupid to think he'll like you once he knows  _ _ y _ _ ou've broken the spell, you've ruined everything _

somehow I had to make him see me as the saintlike student again, his little side project of debauchery that wasn't already twice as wretched before he came along. If I couldn't justify, I could at least explain, so I began. The thread unraveled and brought back uncomfortable memories of a night much like this, though with less visible stars.

 

...

 

Spencer and me, we were running toward the lake in our least expensive sneakers. Each of us had slung a sports bag across one shoulder and mine bumped against my spine with every stride. We had stuffed them both to the brim with money and clothes enough to last us three weeks on the run.

Past the guards and down the hills toward the town. The wind howled in our faces, and we almost howled along with it. We were young, the world danced and burned like flames at the edge of our fingertips and most importantly, we were no longer trapped at the school. Never again would the sun create the illusion that the simple yellow sandstones were pure blocks of gold, no more pretentious food and forced after-school activities. No more freshmen would sweat on us in the hallways between classes. Goodbye hours of homework, farewell fascist teachers and rigid gym classes. We, the kings of school, were in the midst of abdicating, and our entourage weren't even there to salute us and carry us to freedom in brocade and silk palanquins. Our only farewell present a humble middle-finger salute to the values of Saint Franklin's.

The wind sang about freedom, tantalizing, glorious freedom and promised good weathers for sailing. No trains departed this late, and having spent our past year at a boarding school, neither of us trusted our own rusty driving skills. Spencer had checked the train schedules for weeks until that day; he had  assured me  that no trains in fact departed after midnight, and lastly had he cross-referenced train departures from the other town at the end of the lake. I forgot its name but Spencer assured me that he had it all under control. Everything was going to be just fine. The plan would work.

We reached the part of the lake, the so-called  ' beach ' , if one wanted to insult beaches by comparing them to this de pressing half-mile of rocks. Townspeople parked their water vehicles in this spot because none of the kids ever bathed  t here and no Saint Franklin's students jumped off the cliffs  t here either. It was too dangerous; the rocks  were too sharp and too many, so we  used  the west side of the town for that purpose. Most of the vehicles were old wooden dinghies with oars, but some were the size of a truck with blackened windows and calligraphy font on the side reading _ Joy _ or  _ Pax _ or a variety of grandparents' names to honor the proud family traditions and invest nostalgia in capitalism.

The one we were looking for, Tom Conrad's boat, was tiny compared to those monstrosities, but still a lot sleeker than its wooden equals. Given how much Spencer said the guy bragged about the 'pride of his life,' the real thing was a slight disappointment. It was a decade-old white without anything written on either of its sides.

We threw both our bags behind the champagne-colored leather seats, but the echoing thud caused us both to wince and glance around to see if our clamor had woken anyone. Not that there were any houses around. The closest one was a yellow cottage atop the cliffs to our right, and rumor had it that no one used it since its owners killed themselves by jumping off the cliff.

Spencer knelt to inspect the outboard engine with the eye of an expert, nodding and stroking the gray surface. Meanwhile I made sure we were still alone.

“Can you really sail this?” I whispered to him, because the boat looked much too technical for two teenagers.

“Of course I can,” he whispered back at me. Even in the dark, his face resembled a boiled and skinned tomato from the exhaustion of mucking about with the outboard motor. He kept angling it, called it a 'trim' and insisted upon perfect alignment. “It has to be neutral. Too trimmed in, and we'll ride too low in the water. The other way around and we end up in some kind of B action movie scene with the bow tilted way up and we'll attract much more attention. I just wish I could find the kill cord somewhere, damn it.”

“Right, the kill cord.” I nodded, despite having no idea what that was. It sounded dramatic, though. Murder on a sailboat. How ironic.

Minutes passed. Hours, maybe, at least it felt that way. I sat on a boulder a few feet away and had given up on watching out for passersby. The only thing that worried me was how far we could get before sunrise, breakfast and the morning classes where our teachers would undoubtedly notice our absence from the unusual peace and quiet.

Spencer's cursing brought me out of my trance, so I got up and wobbled across the stones to the boat. “What's wrong?”

He had his thumb in his mouth, sucking on it with a pained expression. “I cut myself, but it's no big deal. I just need a minute.”

A minute turned two, then three and ten and it turned out to be a bigger issue than first estimated. He had to sit down for a bit and wrap gauze around his hand. Of course he'd brought gauze. Probably a shit ton of other medical stuff too, whereas I had prioritized all of my records and shoes. My luggage looked like an overstuffed body bag as it lay across the two seats.

So I had to wiggle around with the motor, which was a lot heavier than first estimated. I removed a bolt or two, put them back and wiggled around some more. The engine came to life; it coughed and sputtered at me before it died after a few seconds due to an empty gas tank, or whatever the hell fuel it consumed. I called for Spencer to aid me in my search for gas, and so he too was bent between the seats, searching for a can of it.

As he shuffled about in there, there was a pained persistence to his face that I couldn't ignore or help feeling guilty for.

“Spence,” I tried, but he ignored me. “Maybe we should just go back, try and catch a train tomorrow. We can stay at a hotel for tonight, one of the cheap ones where they don't care that we're underage and should be at the school.”

“No,” he grit out, “we promised. We had a deal and this is us keeping up our part of it. All these months of pushing shit for that creep. I'm not letting him go without damaging him even a little. Just need to find it, he once said that he keeps the cash in his boat. I just, I just need to prove that I'm not some little kid he can shove around, just 'cause he's an arrogant fucking douchebag. I'm not saying that I'm jealous or some shit, but I can't believe Jon talked me into slaving for his _boyfriend._ ” He spat out the word into the pitch black water.

Jealousy. Of course. That's what it all came down to, why we couldn't just take some random boat, and i t felt like a blow to the ribs. Right between them, right after you've eaten and you're sore. The world spins for those seconds where your internal organs and stomach debate whether or not to vomit or give out entirely.  Why hadn't he told me? Why hadn't I seen it? I must have seen it, but I ignored all the too-private, unrequited glances because I was so happy I had finally found friends who didn't judge me. And o f course I would have kept the secret. I wasn't some tattletale, a high school gestapo, hell, I'd never even met that Conrad guy. Jon and Spencer were my friends, the only reason I'd survived a whole year at Saint Franklin's. The fact th at Spencer had never trusted me with this after months and years of pining , well, it hurt. A lot.

Spencer removed a plate to reveal a hidden space underneath the bench meant for beers and equipment. “Fuck, shit, fucking fuck,” he cursed too loudly, so I had to remind him to quiet down a bit _._

“Don't fucking shush me,” he said, though quieter, and pulled at my arm to see whatever calamity resided inside that compartment. “Can't you see it's empty? There's nothing there.”

In the place of the money that should have been there was a plaid blanket and a bottle of vodka, nothing else. A plaid blanket with teddy bears on it.

All caught up in our business and Spencer's swiveling descent into mad regret, neither of us noticed the car engine until Spencer's face went from pale to whiter than the boat. He punched me in the arm and threw his head in the direction of the almost-yacht next to us. He grabbed the bags and I grabbed nothing, just kicked at the side of the boat in anger and frustration of our whole plan slipping through our fingers like the water at our feet.

My foot hit the rear end of the boat and the motor. Hit it twice, on accident, until the thing coughed and I couldn't stop; I just had to get the venom out of my system. The dread that me and Spencer were never going anywhere. All we could do was slink back to the school or down to some motel, and we'd be late, maybe we'd never see Jon again, and it was my fault and it was Tom Conrad's fault and everyone's but ours.

Spencer gesticulated at me again,  _ what the fuck are you doing, get away from there _ . I twisted the top of the oil compartment and kicked the motor one last time, but I still don't know why. To fuck up Tom Conrad for good until we left. For  what he put my friend through, that's why.

“Come on, let's go,” Spencer pleaded, and we went, legs like drumsticks on the ground until we jumped behind another boat to hide ourselves from the sight of the man who approached the boat we had recently attempted to operate. I could practically hear the small black drops of liquid hitting the stones underneath it. But the figure wasn't Tom Conrad. It was three Tom Conrads at best, and from the way Spencer's fingers dug into my wrist, I knew exactly who it was.

Peter Sharp dropped his fishing gear in the boat, not Tom Conrad's, but his own boat. He hummed to himself as he easily adjusted the oil compartment and the motor. He veered the boat out into the water and started it up with a soft whirr of the engine. “We have to tell him,” Spencer whispered. His fingers dug even further into my hand, without him realizing he was doing it and without me caring because our problems were so, so much bigger than a bit of blood and pain.

“But then he'll know we fucked up his boat. We'll get detention, be supervised. We have to get away from here, now. We'll try again tomorrow, right? Or tonight, whatever you –”

“Look.” Spencer pointed to the boat. It shrunk as it sped off towards the horizon until it seemed to pause and wobbled in the waves in the middle of the lake. It was too far away to tell apart from anything else, out there in the dark, and if Sharp screamed for help, no one heard. Something lit up, a tiny pink dot in the middle of all that darkness. The flare dwindled through the sky like a lonely star with a tail of smoke in its path. The sight, even today, still lingers on the back of my eyelids.

“We have to go, now. Someone's gonna show up and they'll find us and we have to explain what we're doing here. We have to go.” As the urgency of my voice deepened, so did the panic in my head, filling me with a blurry dread. Imagine the certainty of stepping down the stairs only to find out you missed not only one, but three steps. Multiply this by thousands and you tumble into nothingness for a surreal period of time where nothing exists but that internal terror. A barrage of questions fired: what happened out there? Was Sharp all right? God, was he even alive? 

“We'll just tell them we came down here to, I don't know, fish or something, and we saw the flare,” Spencer said through some sort of haze. I heard nothing, I saw nothing but that little pink dot and the smoke and the darkness out there on the water, no little wobbling boat between the waves.

“Spencer, we can't –”

“You fucked up,” he said. The sick pallor was gone and replaced by determination. “You really fucked up, and right now we're going back to school and try again next weekend. No boats. We'll take the train. I'll call Jon, I'll tell him what happened, it'll be fine, it's all gonna be just fine. For now, let's get the fuck out of here.”

So we did, in strange surreal motions like wading through thigh high water or quicksand. My head seemed frayed at the edges.

you fucked up

the image of a blank lake, no boat, no nothing.

you fucked up.

Nothing. Just pitch black nothing.

 

...

 

I don't know what happened the following days, but Spencer's parents came without any premonition to pick him up that Saturday morning and left me alone in our room with my thoughts. I spent most of the day on my bed with my arms wrapped around my knees, kind of just rocking back and forth. The next day I spent in my bed and denied that anything ever happened. Monday morning we received the news of Sharp's death. Spencer and me looked at anything but each other.

Bound by respect for the dead, which is just a fancy word for my enormous guilt, we stayed until the funeral. “You know the rest.”

Ryan stared at me with impossibly wide eyes, silent. Behind him the sun had begun its ascent across the sky. It painted the bottom of it a sherbet orange and consumed the stars while the memory of guilt consumed me and the worry consumed our special silence. He opened his mouth, but there was a moment – an elongated, torturous moment in which my every breath scratched my windpipe like wire wool – before he said “you shouldn't tell the police. You say it was an accident, but they won't take it that way.”

Deep down, like really deep down where the light and your conscience doesn't reach, all I wanted was to hear the words “it's not your fault,” regardless of how blatantly the lie shone through every syllable, because hey, it _was_ my fault. Then his words hit me, and what he'd actually said sowed doubt about my own hearing and possible sanity as well. No way I'd heard that right.

“Why?”

Part of me really thought he'd say the opposite. _Be a good boy, do the right thing, confess your sins and purge your soul of your wrong-doings._

A cloud slid past the moon, darkened his face. “Say you go down to the station, say you lead with that line you used on me: “it was my fault.” Anything you say after that can and won't be used against you, because they no longer hear you. They just hear that first sentence. It's like a legal Occam's razor –”

“Occam's what?”

“Sorry, I mean, they see the simplest solution and they pick that. It involves jailing you for a few years, and they never have to deal with that guy you mentioned, the drug dealer. They move on with protecting the city from juvenile delinquents like yourself and ignore the real issues. Boys like you can't speak up for themselves, they can't hire a lawyer –” Here came a break in the bitter monologue: a cross between scoffing and laughter, before he continued: “I'm sure your parents could afford one for you, but do you really want them involved? Because they will be, and in two court sessions your life is ruined. For the police it's more convenient than a donut pit stop.”

Dry forest air filled my lungs and my brain, I went numb; the dewy moss on the ground chilled me like a patch of ice would. I missed the furnace, missed the boarding school, missed Ryan's stupidly soft mattress and the warmth of his bedroom.

“But what if they found out by themselves? What would happen then?”

“There's always the possibility that they won't convict you. You were underage after all. It _was_ an accident.”

Neither of us believed that. It rung cold and hollow in the air like breath in the upstate winter. Again, silence. Compressed, eardrum-bursting silence. Ryan's fingers found mine between the pine needles, chilled and damp from the ground. He squeezed them and the silence constrained less. Slowly my breathing calmed, and left was only a tormenting doubt about whether or not my confession had been the right to do.

“Ryan... You know I didn't kill him, right?”

After a while he nodded and said “I believe you.”

And, you know, I think he really did.

 

We hiked the whole way down hand in hand. The roots seemed less threatening once you'd already fallen over them once, but I only let go when the wood chips emerged on the ground again. Still no one had awoken, and my palms twitched to reach out one last time, but without looking back, Ryan hurried toward the teachers' dormitory. I sneaked back into the still dim hallway, cracked open the door to my own. The door closed without creaking or disturbing anyone, safe for the one person who was already awake and had witnessed everything.

Spencer.

In the shutter-protected room, I only discerned the blue of his eyes blinking at me. Though he never uttered the words, not even soundlessly mimicking them, I heard his voice as if he stood right beside me, and I felt his breath tickling my ear even if the standardized gray blankets confined his mouth. “I know,” his eyes said, “I know exactly where you went and with whom.”

I slipped under my blankets in the hopes of embracing sleep, but when the shrill morning bell pierced my brain, I had not even closed my eyes once.

Through the common cleaning, the unspoken words circled around my head like cartoon-birds after a character has been knocked out on the ground. I had to stabilize myself with walls and mops. I know. I know. _I know_.

When we boarded the bus, my head tilted onto Ian's shoulder to keep him from attempting conversation, and even then Spencer's eyes drilled into my skull and whipped the sweat even faster down my back. The mantra on repeat in my head, an old scratchy record: “I know, I know, I know”, as I yearned for a never-ending bus ride.

 


	11. Chapter 11

After lunch we could no longer avoid it. There were no classes or after school activities for the seniors, only study sessions and study sessions, and in case you planned on a fun afternoon, your tutor could easily squeeze in another study session for you. I longed for one of those, and by study session I meant one on Ryan's bed without clothes, but the man was nowhere to be seen, and so I trudged up the stone steps with my bag alongside Spencer, who remained eerily quiet.

The instance we stepped into our room, he said it.

The magical words.

It was like a mirror shattered; quietly, but the shards cut just the same.

“I know,” Spencer said, this time out loud. With my back to him, I winced and slowly turned around, balancing my face on the edge between skepticism and scorn.

“What are you talking about?”

“Don't play stupid. You know what I'm talking about. You know where you've slept six out of seven nights this week.”

Ice shot up my spine, turned it rigid. Only in robotic movements did I manage to unfold a shirt without trembling so much that it revealed the turmoil in my stomach. My twig-bones upheld a hurricane of nausea. My goddamned face felt like it was melting off my skull in a slew of pink goo, but my muscles were frozen and I couldn't even open my mouth. I stuffed my hands in my pockets so he couldn't see the shaking. I looked like an old man with Parkinson's disease. The thermostat on the wall showed a hundred and two degrees, the air between me and him at least triple negative that amount.

Spencer, above all, looked on the brink of collapsing. He seemed smaller, his cheeks hollower and his voice sounded like an old man with smoker's lungs when he said “I just wanna know why you thought it was a good idea. I mean, out of all the crazy concepts you've come up with, this one has to be the most insane. Was it the attention? The sensation? Another way to piss of your parents?”

I'd turned into nothing but a parrot repeating its own words: “what are you talking about?”, though I no longer managed the incredulous tone.

“I know you; that's why you do all this crap. ”

Here came the burning shame of knowing he was right. Straight in its path followed the desperation about how well he knew me.

I clung to my last excuse: “maybe I just like him.”

Spencer didn't even deign himself to respond.

How long had he known, I asked, with trembling lips and hands and nerves. I wrought the lining of my pockets and concentrated on calculus and the color green to starve away any thoughts. No reply. Spencer just fiddled with the cord to his phone and looked incessantly bored. Embarrassed, even, if I squinted.

“You're not exactly James Bond. It was so blatant, I don't understand how everyone didn't find out as soon as I did.”

Miraculously I managed to tear the words from the crater of my mouth without my voice breaking. “Who else knows?”

It seemed a volcano erupted on the other bed; Spencer hurled his phone at the floor, cord and all. His elbows crashed into the bed-frame with an eerily hollow knock, but without inspecting his injuries, he just glared at me with the attitude of a scientist faced with a horde of anti-Darwinists.

“You're kidding me, right? Do you want me to say that they're too caught up in themselves, or that you're really smooth, because you're not. It took me two weeks to figure out why you spent so long in the “bathroom” every night. The lack of diapers told me it wasn't fucking incontinence. Then class, oh my god, don't even get me started on the way you ogle him with your huge puppy-eyes, and you're always late to lunch, 'cause you get extra credit or some smacks with a cane or whatever it is you two do when you stay behind after class. He's your teacher, for Christ's sake, it's disgusting.”

I won't pretend that comment didn't sting the slightest. “If no one else knows, what's the big deal? I can see who I want.”

“Because it took you all of four days to come up with this plan, when we had a plan already, and you left it up to me to explain to Jon why we weren't coming this weekend after all because you were oh so busy. But fuck, we had a deal. We were –”

I never heard what exactly Spencer thought constituted our friendship, like that night on the lake shore had somehow bound us together in holy misdemeanor. I was too angry to detect the rest of his sentence, no matter how tight-knit friends he claimed us to be.

“You didn't seem too keen on upholding your end of that deal, did you?” The volume of my voice caused the birds outside to screech and flap away. “You wanted your scholarships and shit and I couldn't have that, so I made up a new plan, and excuse me if you weren't part of it.”

Spencer ceased his fiddling and for a moment the anger slid off his face, replaced by its cousin Deep Concern. “Are you saying you didn't get accepted anywhere?”

Can you believe this guy? Even with all his _As_ and _A pluses_ , this fact still managed to slip his mind. “Of course I am,” I mocked. “The highest grade I've ever gotten was a _C_ and that was by mistake because the teacher thought he was grading Jeremy Olsson, and you know that 'cause you were the one who corrected him.”

Never mind that Mr. Davis wasn't supposed to overhear Spencer and the comment was whispered on the back row, Spencer was still the one who deprived me of my only ever _C_ , and for some reason the bitterness only welled up in me fourteen months later.

“But your parents could pay for you, right?”

“I don't care about my parents,” I yelled, causing more birds to desert the tree outside the window sill. “I'm sick of them; I'm sick of everyone who thinks my future is ruined because I can't get into college, and it's expected of me to bawl my eyes out over some rejection letter. Yeah, boohoo, it hurt, but guess what, I got over it. I had a plan. Me and you had a plan, we weren't supposed to go to college anyway. I could fall back on that plan, and now I can fall back on my new plan.”

The concern on Spencer's face dissolved as dew under the sun, replaced by a sudden half-guffaw, a big great “HAH!” before the real jab set in. “Oh, don't give me that crap, you don't still believe that, do you? That we could just go to Europe and come back when we're twenty three and get real jobs?”

“Of course I can get a job – I could be a musician, or take some European education, they're practically free and waymore interesting than the American ones anyway. You, we said, you know... we were gonna do that over there, you and me and...”

“Will you grow up and realize that no, you can't get anything above minimum wage, and you'll be living off of porridge twenty eight days a month once your parents cut you off like they _will_ because you're legal and, unless you didn't already know, so spoiled that you actually believe in what you're saying?”

Spencer's mom drove a battered white van and their one story house had no TV in Spencer's room, only a small one downstairs. Jacket potatoes and baked beans for lunch, store brand cola, the way his mom polished off everything before I came to visit, sometimes even while I was in their house. Still their cutlery didn't sparkle like what we had at home, and I never paid attention to it until the sum of all this evidence towered up before me in every syllable spat at me in the lavish boarding school dorm room.

I tuned out of station minimum-wage Ginger Smith and back onto her son's monologue.

“Maybe I grew up in while you were busy fucking around with our teacher. I realized I need a college degree more than I need to see Barcelona before I'm twenty. Maybe it's about time you realized that, too. Where are your priorities, I mean, who do you think you're kidding with this affair? You have nowhere to go.”

At that point Spencer had left his bed and paced restlessly back and forth between me and the door. “And where are you going?” If my previous volume had scared off crows and crickets, this time I barely heard myself.

“Stanford,” said Spencer. His face was flushed with frustration, and every time he glanced at me, the crystalline empathy, no, pity _,_ mingled with it, and I felt miles below the surface of the ocean, drowning in my own humiliation.

“But I thought you wanted an east coast education. I thought you were over him.”

He froze mid-movement, gloating at me, before he picked up his pacing again.

“I don't know how you found out, but I'll still be staying with Jon. The school granted me a scholarship. I'm majoring in Sociology.”

Since when the stones on the beach shredded our knees bloody and Spencer held my hand because the man on the lake was no longer there, replaced by a pink dot on the sky, I guess I had known that the three of us would never breeze through landscapes in a rented car on European plates. But hearing it spoken out loud, those mirages dissolved into gray ashes on my cornea as I imagined Spencer in a navy robe with a degree and a promising future ahead of him, Jon and his parents in the audience as he graduated.

“Congratulations.” Before anything even remotely personal came out of my mouth, which had been replaced by what seemed a gaping wound, Spencer cut me off again.

“What were you even going to _do_? It's not like you could just flounce off and live with Mr. Ross”

The oh so pleasant image reel began flickering with black and white and unusually nostalgic snapshots of of me and Ryan in some back-alley apartment, a lion-footed bathtub, bookshelves stocked with all his literary luggage, a half-gallon juice box on a breakfast table next to freshly baked bread and a newspaper, double mattress striped linens early mornings, a sleepy “come back to bed, Brendon”, some back-alley apartment with me as its sole inhabitant, scattered breakfast table, empty carton juice box, single mattress, no electricity, single mattress striped linens me alone alone alone.

I said nothing. I had nothing to say that would change his mind when I couldn't even change my own.

Spencer yanked open the last drawer in his bureau and threw something at me, a wrapped square with a ribbon on it. “Happy belated birthday,” he said before he marched to the door and slammed it after himself so hard, I felt it in my ears and lungs and those bones that were supposed to carry me after him and explain myself. Make it up. Be best friends again.

Inside the present was the one CD I'd ranted about for weeks in the spring, and underneath it was a Christmas card with the inscription _didnt have any bday cards at home but congratulations. dont waste your 18_ _th_ _year away on something or someone who cant remember your name in ten or even two years. – spence_

  


_..._

  


I should have followed him, but I remained frozen to the floor for what seemed an eternity. I counted the days left until the SATs, preoccupied with the horrifyingly small number, over and over again, this number in loops and circles and somersaults, until a knock on the door disturbed me.

“What are you doing here?”

“I just wanted to see you, that's all,” said Ryan.

I sat down on my bed, calmer. “Come on in, then. Sorry for the mess.” I'm not sure why I apologized; the room was always messy, but I felt compelled to excuse something, and the easiest was the heaps of laundry and piles of half-torn magazines no one had read for months, most of them now on my side of the room.

Ryan sat down as well.

“Are you ready for Friday?” he asked, meaning the SATs. And I was far from it, but nothing could ever prepare me, let alone him. Spencer echoed in my ears, hollow and dead-on with his “ _it's not like you could just flounce off and live with Mr. Ross._ ”

So I lied and said, yes, I was ready, only tinged a little by guilt when he sank back onto my bed. Like he'd held his breath until he got here, only waiting for this one small affirmation. “Good. I knew we could prepare you for it” and then, even more stupidly encouraging, “I believe in you. You'll pass just fine.”

Smiling, he curled his index finger at me and hushed “c'mere,” rough and low, like I was just some pet he could call for and I would come, but I so adored the velvet in that voice and I couldn't disobey it when I had only four days left of school.

The least I could do was try.

I obliged and crawled closer, until my back met the wall. He kissed me and the bed felt like the sways of a storm-swept boat, ironically retracing my steps on that January night on the beach, but did it really matter anymore? He knew about that evening and yet he was still here, on my bed, kissing me.

_f_ _our days of school, four days left with him, ninety eight hours_

With my shirt bunched up over my chest, his hands held me in place, wonderfully exposed, but only to him, as if the warmth that coursed through me simply provided a shield, a veil of privacy that assured no one else entered the room. His teeth grazed my lowest rib, his nails dug into my skin through the fabric. Maybe he too sensed the short-lived time left, because every feathery kiss to my stomach felt like sand in an hourglass running out. His teeth dug down, into my hips like he could hold on to me that way; at least I liked to imagine that was why. It was better than being just one last fix.

Spencer, contemptuous, _what were you even going to do?_ New words, still in his voice, though, sounded _he doesn't even like you, he'll stay here and you'll go away and it never meant anything you stupid stupid child_

Back to my mouth, Ryan let go of my shirt and instead slipped his arms around my neck, so tight I almost believed he'd never let go and the circular motion of his tongue could be on loop forever.

Maybe, just maybe, if kissed him long, hard, well enough, we could work out something, a compromise in which I still got to see him every day. Maybe if I failed those SATs and had to repeat the year, I could have him closer and closer and nibble on his bottom lip like this every day.

Through the veil of my eyelashes, I noticed a shadow at the door; long fingers folded around the edge of it, and in one of the glimpses where my lashes pasted together I saw the events from their point of view in a nebular explosion of depravity.

Ryan unbuttoned my jeans with hungry fingers while the door creaked, agonizingly slow. The tip of his tongue waltzed across the roof of my mouth as a pair of high heels clacked against the floorboards, followed by a gasp.

On top of me, Ryan stiffened, and slowly, all too slowly, he slid off me and turned to face the person at the door.

Seven months after I had last seen her and she looked just the same, except her red lips opened and closed over and over again, trying to formulate sound. Her jaw twitched and her eyes darted from me to Ryan, to the all too small space between us and the bite marks on my exposed hipbones. That's when she said it: the worst word she could have ever uttered and everything – my past, the slim hope of a future, which had precariously balanced on the sharpest of knives without me realizing – slipped from the edge, soundlessly and quickly sliced into two perfect, red, bleeding halves the color of her lipstick as she formed the word “Ryan” with her mouth, disbelieving but worst of all with a heart-aching recognition in her voice.

  


  


  


“What's going on?” Kara continued, the frown between her inked brows now a deep cleft that highlighted her genes from our dad. Below it her eyes scrutinized me, the floor, and occasionally Ryan. The way she looked at him wasn't the way you'd look at your brother's teacher, someone you had never met in your life.

When she started talking it confused me even more; she directed her pleading words at him, not me. “I had no other choice, they were gonna kick me out if I told them the truth, you know that.”

Ryan's hand, still locked around my wrist, tightened until it almost cut off circulation to my hand. I unwrapped it as gently as possible and scooted away from him and the aura of wrath he exuded. The room seemed to grow darker and darker as some unknown tension built up in an uneven triangle between us and rose to the ceiling like smoke, threatening to choke us all.

“That's not an excuse,” he said. “You ruined my life.”

“I know, I know.” Kara twisted her feet in her pink suede stilettos, her eyes dropped to the ground before her face shot up again. “But I said I'm sorry, and I don't know what else you want. I was desperate; I'd lose everything I worked for.”

“I never thought I'd be subjected to your face again.”

“Likewise.” She pushed aside her hair to reveal heated pink cheeks that complimented her shoes, as always trimming herself before a battle. “But maybe you should have thought about that before you picked the only school in the country with my brother in it and then decided you should try and ruin his life, too.”

“I had no choice,” Ryan said. One tone louder and he'd be flat out yelling. “I couldn't get any other job because of you, you coward, you –”

I'd never heard an insult that demeaning. I should have interfered and defended her, but I was still frozen to the bed; all my organs had turned to ice and my limbs to jelly, and I could hardly scoot farther than an inch away from Ryan, whose body coiled in preparation to spring off the bed and attack Kara with fists and my alarm clock and whatever else he could get his hands on.

Kara flung her purse at the floor where it landed with a hollow thud and something fragile inside it broke. “Don't come around acting like it was all my responsibility, you were the adult and you could have just –”

“You were an adult, too,” Ryan interrupted her. He stepped to his feet, fists balled up, muscles tensed and defined all the way up his arms, and maybe I should intervene before he pounced her.

“ _He_ isn't,” said Kara, pointing without looking at me. “Maybe it was good I reported you after all; look what you've done.”

_Ryan kneeling at the floor next to my bed, nodding in shame as I asked him “that's why they fired you, wasn't it? You slept with a student.”_

“You should be locked up.”

Once again the door to my room flew open. The last person I wanted to see stood behind it, and given how my sister had just barged in on me and my teacher dry-humping on my bed, this was a pretty explicit statement to make. But this woman towered above us in all black, black boots, black pants that lead up to a utility belt with threatening instruments hooked too it. She terrified me more than any of the words hat Ryan and Kara slung at each other, because she had come for me and me alone. She opened her mouth, but all I could focus on was the way the light caught the handcuffs at her hip and the black metal of her gun.

“Do you have a moment to follow me to the station? We have a few questions we'd like to ask you.” Her combat boots and fierce expression pointed, not toward me, but at Ryan.

I swore I heard his heart stop, or maybe it was just my own, but something ceased in that moment. His last hope, maybe. The anger in his eyes died down, crumbled and dissolved into silence, and it broke the vicious energy that had bounced between us and the walls. It left the room even darker and colder than before. Outside the clouds cramped together in violet and black bruises on the sky, making way for a thunderstorm.

With the police officer present, I couldn't look at Ryan the way I needed to; I couldn't mouth the words “you'll be okay,” and after Kara's revelations, I wasn't sure if I wanted to.

Ryan followed the police officer and slowly turned his head with a face devoid of any emotion but pure, undiluted fear. Kara and I watched in silence as the door closed behind him and the clouds fractured and discharged months and months of pent-up rain onto the grounds.

  


...

  


“Explain yourself,” I ordered at the same time as Kara admitted she had to do some explanation.

She sat down on my bed, and for as long as two nanoseconds I thought we were back at our parents' house and covered in blankets with two cups of hot cocoa between us even though it was eighty five degrees outside, but we wanted to nip at the marshmallow layer on top anyway.

So she began, hurried and tripping over her own voice: “Fresher's week, there was this party at campus right, with all the new students. Beer kegs, strip poker, it was pretty wild. Like, bad comedy college stereotype wild. And all these dudes were hitting on me, all these really creepy seniors with worn-out pick up lines like “did you fall from heaven 'cause I'm an art major and there's this renaissance painting in my textbook with this angel that looks just like you”.

No matter how often I told them off, it was just useless, so I found a corner in the library and sat down with a smoke. He was reading something and taking notes and said “you can't do that in here.” I thought he was a complete asshole, so I lit one anyway, but I couldn't. Turns out there was this constant humidifier or something wafting from the ventilation shafts so using a lighter was physically impossible. The fire just wouldn't catch on, and he laughed when I tried.”

My insides curdled at the image. “What then?”

“Well,” she said, “we started talking and he was really nice. I thought he was, like, a really mature senior, 'cause I'd never seen him hang out with any of the students. But it turned out he was my friend Lizzie's American Lit professor. We kept bumping into each other at the library or the canteen and he was so often with some of the other teachers, but sometimes we met alone and we talked about books and art. He had such an interesting view on everything; I could listen to him for hours.”

Yeah, I knew the feeling. Or at least I thought I did.

She sighed and straightened the pleats in her skirt. “We had a relationship, I guess. For around two months, I don't know when exactly it started. But I know when it ended.

It's a big campus, lots of students, lots of gossip. We got caught in the act. I had to visit the dean in his office, and he told me what had happened had grave consequences for my future at campus. I didn't have a scholarship or anything to keep me there, thousands of students were eager to take my space. He told me they couldn't keep students who led their staff astray. Astray, as if it was my fault alone, hah! I was so stunned, I didn't know what to say, but I had to say something. College means everything to me, you understand that, right? So I told the dean it wasn't my fault. That the professor had assaulted me, that I didn't know his name but he taught literature and he was much younger than the other professors. That really only left one option.”

Something pressed its way up through my esophagus. I feared it was vomit and swallowed hard to keep the dizziness at bay. Kara was still straightening her skirt out in front of her despite its inherent smoothness. Her fingers trembled.

“I didn't know he would end up teaching here, did I? I never thought I'd see him again, I didn't _think_ about him much after it happened. He was just gone, out of my life and since he wasn't my professor, I didn't care. And you know, now I'm starting to believe I did the right thing. I mean, look what he did, of all the students in the world, he picks my little brother to debauch.”

Her molten doe eyes found mine for reassurance. I could count the amount of times she had cried in front of anyone on one hand, but as she blinked, a couple of tears slid down the side of her nose.

“You understand that, right? Brendon, please don't be mad at me, I didn't know.”

Know what? About him and me? “I don't care about that,” I said. The strange thing was, I didn't. For now Ryan had no space in my head. The Ryan Kara talked about and _my_ Ryan weren't even the same person, if they were people at all and not just figments of my hyperactive imagination. Something boiled inside me, a red hot vicious fury at the conflict and all its interested parties, even myself. Especially myself.

“All this time, you lied to us?” The volume of my voice caused her to startle and shrink under my anger. “You have no idea how worried I was, how many nights I spent sleepless because some guy did that to you and no one else cared? Mom and dad didn't care, you stopped going to therapy, you threw yourself at strangers, you stopped talking to _me_ about all the things that mattered. I thought I'd lost you or something to this guy, and then all of it was fake? You never... he never?”

At first she laughed, _“that's_ your reaction? _I'm_ the one you're pissed at?” and then she said it, she finally uttered the irrevocable words “But no, nobody raped me.”

My relief was grotesque. The monster in the closet with all its venomous fangs and red eyes, it wasn't there, it was only a shadow. There was no stranger. No violence.

Kara's hand stroked me on the back and brought back memories of when I was six and had the flu while our parents had guests over and both they and the maid busied themselves with polishing the metaphorical and actual silverware.

Survival instinct ran in the veins of our family along the endless stream of money. My mom exploiting her pregnancy for the sake of my dad's campaign? That's survival instinct right there. Kara's rumor and the weeks she spent in so-called therapy. Mid-hug rejections, silence covering our holiday dinners like a blanket of guilt. Lies about everything. Sur-vi-val instinct.

I wanted nothing more than to be mad at her. Or mad at Ryan because he knew all along who I was and therefore who my family was. Mad at anything or anyone but myself, but strangely enough I wasn't mad at me either. I only felt a calm distance from the situation, so surreal and warped it was like watching through inches of bottle glass. I had lost all sense of which was right, which was horizontal and who was to blame for the morbid irony of the situation.

“Here, drink something,” she said and handed me a half-empty bottle of tepid coke. “It'll make you feel better.”

It didn't, but it cleansed my mouth enough for me to talk again.

“I don't know what to say. Or think. Or feel. I know it's not about me, but I just don't understand why you lied to me.”

“I would have told you, but I was ashamed of myself. I mean, there's so many girls out there and so many fucked up people who actually force themselves on others and I wasn't one of those victims. I only lied about it, and you... you just can't lie about something like that, so I lied about lying. I'm sorry.”

“So all the support groups...?”

“I went to one,” she admitted. “I went to one and there were all these girls and a couple of guys, too, all these kind, lovely people with their lives in ruins because of some stranger. Most of them couldn't even get a trial because their assailant slipped through some legal loophole. I was a fake. My presence in those groups felt like mocking the actual victims, right?”

“Are you okay, though? That's the most important thing. I just want you to be okay.”

She nodded and continued to rub my back. It felt different from when Ryan did – no, no, I didn't want to think about him sitting alone at the police station with handcuffs and a glass of water and his whole life shattered in pieces at his feet.

“I'm okay. And you'll be, too,” she soothed, and to the sound of her voice I fell asleep.

  


...

  


When I woke up a few hours later, Kara still sat on my bed, typing on her cellphone. She stashed it away in her purse and told me to close my eyes.

“I brought you a birthday present,” she said. The bed shifted under us as she leaned for something on the floor and brought it to my side. She swatted away my hands as I blindly grappled for the wrapper, and when my finger caught the ribbon, she finally surrendered and placed it in my lap. Instantly I knew what it was from the weight and the shape and the choir of angels that should have been singing hallelujah to soundtrack this glorious moment of finally, finally, finally.

Still with my eyes closed I unwrapped the flimsy ribbon around the neck, then the rough wrapping paper until I met calloused leather and underneath that, polished alder in a fumbling collision of sweaty fingerprints and guitar.

Carefully I peeled open one eyelid and tilted my gaze down to meet the instrument in my hands, its rosewood fingerboard and the glinting tuners yet untouched by anyone else.

“You didn't –” I choked on my own words and exaltation. “You bought me this? Its the exact model, how did you get that?”

She smiled knowingly and I hugged her until I remembered the events a few hours earlier and had to let go. Her smile faltered and we sat in silence, though undoubtedly a more pleasant one than the last.

“I was so shocked to see him here,” she began, but upon sensing my aversion to discussing Ryan, she leaped into a different subject. “Um, I was going to ask you this sooner, but so much happened: where are you going after summer?”

“Which college, you mean? I can spare you pain and tell you that every place I applied for denied me.”

She frowned. “Really? But mom and dad, they'll pay for everything, there's no reason for why anyone would deny you.”

“Apart from my grades that is. My average is, like, an F minus.”

“But you're not...”

“I'm not that stupid? Well, maybe I am. I kind of accept that now.”

“Brendon, college isn't even that hard. It's super fun, and it's totally not about the subjects only. I mean, sure you have to study some and there are assignments, but there's tons of parties and the people are amazing... Summer school only takes a few weeks of your life, but without a college degree you'll spend years trying to get a job anywhere but some fastfood joint. And since you have the funds, you'd be wasting your privilege.”

“Mom and dad have the funds,” I cut her off. “I don't want anything to do with them anymore.”

“Why not?”

I formed a bump on my stomach with my hands, cringing at the thought of baby powder and baby mash and another job for the maid to take care of.

Kara nodded and squeezed my shoulder. “She told you, too.”

“More like I found out from channel four news reporter Audrey something.”

“Oh my god, you saw it on the news? God, that's horrible. When?”

I told her, but eliminated the details about my head in Ryan's lap before and afterward.

“But that's – oh my god, they didn't tell you‽ Oh, they're awful human beings. You're their son, how could they not tell you‽ Jesus Christ, I need a smoke. D'you have any?”

With my right hand still loose around the neck of my guitar, I fished a cigarette from the pocket of my backpack. She lit it hurriedly and heaved a drag until finally she calmed down enough to continue talking.

“Mom seriously didn't tell you?”

I shook my head. Kara offered me the cigarette and I reveled in its nicotine. It felt nice to plummet the room and break another rule before leaving behind Saint Franklin's, but it still didn't erase the hollows inside my chest, the feeling of my internal organs being wrenched from my body and hung up to dry in front of me.

“We're a family of fucking psychos, do you know that?”

I agreed and then I told her the story about Peter Sharp, after which she said nothing, just hugged me, and we fell asleep like that.

  


She stayed the whole night because Spencer slept in the room of someone else, evidently still too pissed to grant me his presence. Kara packed her bag early in the morning, hugged me again and donned her Prada shades to conceal her smudged makeup. “Promise me you'll consider summer school, right? I can mail you the papers tonight when I arrive at mom and dad's. I'll try and talk to them and tell them to stop neglecting you.”

I nodded and handed her her purse.

“Thanks again for the gift. I can't believe you bought it for me, I mean, I'm happy. Thank you.”

She chuckled and embraced me one last time. All her perfume clung to my clothes instead of hers, a deep orange blossom scent that she bought to annoy our mom, who couldn't stand it. Said it gave her migraines. Hopefully Kara would douse herself in it before she entered our house.

As soon as Kara opened the door, Spencer was on the other side with bags under his eyes and his proverbial tail between his legs. She breezed past him in an elegant cloud of orange blossom and cigarette smoke. In return he greeted her with a polite smile, which soon melted into the deceptive smirk of a villain, not that he was a villian, but Christ, it looked just like the kind of smile you see right before the filmic hero's demise. And then he said: “guess what? They fired Mr. Ross.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe it's almost over. And by almost over I don't mean that there's one chapter left of this fic; I mean that I probably won't be writing much fanfiction at all in 2015, if any. I've written a bunch (too much) in 2013 and 2014, but school is starting to wrench all enjoyment of creative writing out of me lol. I have one or two Christmas fics prepared but that's probably all you'll hear from me for quite a time.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i am beyond done with this story in every aspect except posting all of it, but here is the last chapter... thanks for the ride :^)

Despite the upcoming SATs (44 hours), all anybody talked about was Ryan. In the dining hall, in the isles between tables in the classrooms, in the matinée where Ryan used to show our class movies as an excuse to sit next to me. Thinking about it now, that might have been part of his downfall. I wondered if any other teacher had done it before him only to scold myself for thinking about him in the first place.

With Kara's advice in my head, I decided to join my friends for a study session (36 hours), though I had spoken to none of them for days. We flipped several coins before they appointed me as the one to pick up snacks at the grocery store.

I paved the wet streets after the thunderstorms and heard strangers bad-mouth 'the teacher up at that dreadful school who couldn't keep his hands to himself'. Kids younger than me at the playground in their bright raincoats with matching pallets talked about 'the bad man' as if there had never existed bad men before Ryan. Here of all places was a breeding ground for corruption.

And if Ryan, who pressed feather-light kisses to the back of my thighs, who helped me through hours and hours of homework, who told me I was the worst student and sweetest idiot he'd ever known, was bad, then what was the bikers astride their vehicles outside Sally's diner, the ones who cracked sexism and racism in disguise as jokes, slapping the ass of their waitress and cheating her for tips?

Two elderly women waited at the bus stop and looked at me with pitiful eyes inside those bags of wrinkled skin, and it  seemed  their faces were masks of rubber and their bodies statues of wax. Either of them might have been the kitty litter lady from my birthday. They nodded politely at me as if I grievance for my situation was appropriate, though I bet they nodded at all the Saint Franklin's students these days  in case any of us had been subjected to Abuse by An Authority . 

Even without my uniform I wore a red-hot brand mark that proclaimed  _ Property of The Educational System _ and regardless of the hours left until the SATs (33), that mark was still there. I scowled at the women and pulled my hood closer over my hair. The rain rekindled as I reached the gates of the school, but I slowed my pace  and enjoy ed the blessed minutes where no one mentioned the name Ross or, as was apparently a popular nickname, 'the pedophile'. First of all, I don't think it counts as pedophilia if the child is above the age of twelve, and second of all the thought of him sickened me. Or at least it should do so.

When I returned to the library, it was emptied of freshmen, who had presumabl y escaped because Gabe sent spit-balls through stolen straws at their seats. Little white toilet-paper gobs littered most of the floor and even  some of  the bookshelves.  I n the cushion-stuffed  C harleston chairs  someone said “ _ I heard it was a freshman _ ” and “ _ they shouldn't let people like him work with kids _ ”. I  thought the voices were echoes until I realized t hese voices  came from my group of friends  seated in the chairs . I poured the bags of chips and cans of energy drinks onto the table before us where books and inked notebooks already covered most of the surface.

Midnight passed and the hall guard ignored us when he came to check after half an hour of sharing tips and cheats, during which I exerted myself  by  rifling through the material everyone else had provided. But math graphs and short story analyses muddled together in the left side of brain, drip ped out  of  my ear and into a pool of oblivion on the floor next to the leak in the roof that  no one  would ever fix because it only rained two weeks a year anyway. In the right side of my brain, the same scene looped of me and Ryan in his annex with the lights dimmed and  _ hypotaxis is when sentences are subordinate to one another, dependent on each other. That makes sense, right? _

Nothing made sense anymore. My life wasn't fucking hypotactic or whatever; it was like my head after too much studying, just a big mess of commas and calamities.

William was the first to break the silence. “I still can't believe it,” he said. “He was such a good teacher.”

“But could you seriously imagine any of our teachers molesting a student?”

“True.”

“It's just so disgusting.”

“Guys, can we stop talking about it, I'm gonna barf up my dinner.”

“Please, that was hours ago, you already digested it.”

“I don't think it's true,” said Spencer. Everybody else stopped crunching their Doritos and listened to him. “I mean, you said it yourself; he's a good guy. I don't exactly think he would touch anybody without their consent, and let's be real, who would ever be stupid enough to sleep with him?”

A nervous laughter erupted in the quiet library and I bit down on a fun-sized candy bar to deliver myself from partaking. The clock showed 30 hours left until the SATs when I excused myself that I was tired.

“Already?” asked Joe. I shrugged and left the group. Outside the sky was pitch black and a rare chill hung in the air. The hallway to my right lead to Annex G, but was a much longer route. I followed it anyway and stopped outside the now curtain-less windows. Most of his things were still in there: the books and the records. A coffee cup waited in solitude for its owner who would never return.

Where was he, anyway? He probably left town. Not that I cared; I really, really didn't.

“Shouldn't you be in your bed young man?” asked the hall guard. I jerked at the noise, having spent too long wallowing in the past. I trotted off, past the bell tower and the path that lead to the iron gates. The town glistened in the aftermath of the rainstorm, and the wind swept non-existent trees and plants around. Soon worse winds would come, but I wouldn't be anywhere near southern Arizona at that point.

_ W _ _ here else will you go? _ a small voice,  too similar to Spencer's,  asked.  _ Y _ _ ou have no one _ . 

In the end, Kara was right. I had to participate in summer classes, then find a college that would accept my despicable grades and abundance of money.

Once again the sky split open and released a flood on the school.

 

...

 

Kara texted me the following morning, when I was busy reading through Spencer's papers before the SATs (22 hours).

_ u still comin home this summer? _

I didn't respond. Meticulously I read through my own sparse notes and Spencer's fuller ones for hours on end. I refused breakfast and lunch, instead opting for the remains of last night's snacks. My watch ticked too loudly in the silent room until I got so fed up with the damned thing, I ripped it off my wrist and hurled it into the opposite wall. It was the third present from my parents I had smashed in that exact spot, but this time I had only visibly dented it. It still counted every passing second, tick tick tick.

I strode across the room and picked  it  up, then placed it gently on the floor and  stuck my feet into  my heaviest pair of  boots . As brutally as possible, I stomped my heel right down on it until I heard  a crunching sound. Then followed the school books, the supporting beam from under my mattress and finally the corner of my bed in a frenzy of destruction. I smashed and smashed with edges and corners until I was out of breath and the diamonds were scattered all over the floor. I had no desire to pick up the thousands of dollars I had just wrecked. Inside me was nothing but  scorching  hatred at the thought, the idea, no the  _ fact _ that I had to return to my acclaimed home in Nevada.

I began stuffing a bag with their birthday money and clothes. Whatever didn't fit in there I didn't care about enough to bring with me. I toyed with the idea of leaving the school right after the test tomorrow was done, regardless of what I might miss out on of parties and pranks on headmaster Daniels. I could go anywhere, from southern California to San Francisco to the northern border or all the way to New York or Florida. I could go anywhere; my home was nowhere.

My phone beeped and interrupted my fantasy. It was a text from Spencer, simply reading  _ look out the window.  _ I did, and my heart sank in my chest. The two people below, a man and a woman, were both clad in all black and  they conversed –  argued, actually –  with Levi Daniels. The whistling wind carried their voices  to my  window , and what I heard stopped my heartbeat for so long, I feared it might never start again.

“Urie? He lives up there. I'm sure you'll find him guilty of something, whatever it is.” Daniels pointed right at the curtains that shielded me from view.

The female officer said something like “we just want to talk with him,” yeah right, I knew exactly what that meant. Her and her partner began the ascent up the stairs, which gave me exactly four minutes and fifty eight seconds to leave my room. With my heart pounding in my chest, I grappled for my suitcase, then the guitar case and darted out of the door, unable to slam it behind me as the luggage weighed down both my arms. I sprinted past stone walls and deserted dormitories, ignoring the pain that bolted up and down my legs every time either of my cases knocked into my knees. When I reached the bell tower, I hid behind it. The outer door stood ajar, but the inner one was firmly locked. My legs trembled under me before they gave up completely and I fell on my ass atop my suitcase. I spent a few minutes regaining my breath, which felt like someone had ripped it from me, before I peered outside through the small barred window, spotting the dormitory buildings.

The police officers were inside my room. What was I doing, hiding like this? It raised suspicion, but didn't they already know? What if they questioned Spencer about that night at the lake and he cracked under pressure?

_ Don't be foolish.  H e won't crack. _

I shifted on the suitcase for a better field of view, but the clouds had gathered once again and darkened the entire landscape. My stomach uttered a hungry litany and I shushed it. I couldn't possibly go down to the dining hall.

_But what if he does? You'll go to prison_ , said the voice inside my head. It had showed up some point after the trip to Flagstaff and grown louder and louder the closer the SATs came (less than 15 hours).

 

The way I saw it, I had two options. This wasn't a fight or flight situation. No way could I tackle two grown officers with guns, batons and maze and all other kinds of psycho crap. I'd end up face first in the rubble with two teeth knocked out and blood filling my mouth like the tomato soup they served down in the dining hall right for Thursday dinners.

My stomach complained again at the mention of tomato soup, and I imagined filling my mouth with it, dipping cliff-size chunks of ciabatta in it and sucking the half-dissolved bread into my mouth in a volcanic eruption of oregano, olive oil and garlic oh god it was so damp inside that stupid tower, it felt like I had pissed my pants.

My brain yelled at me  to go back to my options , the first of which involved me returning to my room and allow ing interrogation. Possibly the officers would drag me down to the station for a more in-depth questioning. Maybe even arrest me.

The second option meant that I stayed in the bell tower until the police had left, but when would they do that, exactly? I needed to sleep before the test (a cashmere sweater didn't constitute a real pillow). I needed to eat something. I needed to pee.

Pete once said that you could lose a kidney if you held it in for too long. Your bladder would just explode inside you. Pete said “so this dude rode a train with an always-occupied bathroom, right? And nobody knew if it was just some kids trying to get out of a ticket or if it was genuinely broke, but this dude just sat in his seat for hours with no way of relief. I think it was from Chicago to New York or something, like, a really long trip.” Depending on which day of the week Pete told it, the man either leaked all over the seat, like when you popped an already wet paper bag full of fluid, or an ambulance rushed him to a hospital where the doctors operated a catheter into the man so he could pee properly again.

There was a very real possibility that I would be trapped inside the bell tower like some god damned Rapunzel parody. If I hadn't smashed my watch, I would have been able to tell time, but alas, the biggest debris of that was its lock.

What if I ran out of oxygen? People had been known to die from a lack of air in confined spaces, right?

Of course there was a third option, painfully evident but never possible despite all my plans and intentions. Until this moment, like a secret weapon not to be unleashed until the most dire time of need. I guessed my darkest hour had come, then.

 

...

I forced open the door with the last of strength, concentrating on not pissing my pants as I did so. Not using it for too long meant it might get stuck, which indicated just how long I had hidden in the tower. The sky rumbled higher than my stomach, fierce and threatening. No one was around, so I stuck out my head from the small space and breathed in gulps and gulps of fresh air. It didn't fill me as much as dinner would have, but I relished it anyway.

Then I looked around before I undid my zipper. If anyone passed they would have seen just a stream of piss that came from inside the tower. Maybe someone would bring up that ghost rumor again, yeah, that'd be nice, maybe people would stop talking about Ryan, maybe it would garner attention away from my arrest (if it ever occurred).

 

The hulking buildings concealed me. Everything was a nuance of blue or black, even this early in the evening, and the shadows cast were not from the sun but rather the school itself, which in this sort of weather intimidated even its bravest students, no matter how profoundly we denied it. Without sunshine its dirty walls looked ashen gray and the black roof tiles weighed it down so that it seemed to sink six feet into the soil.

Apart from the main gate, there was one other way outside of the areas. The kitchen personnel used it for food deliveries, and only right around mealtimes. Depending on how long I had hidden in the tower, it might clash with my plan. I stepped mostly on the patches of grass, not that crunching gravel ever alerted anyone in this part of campus, and with my heart lodged near my uvula, I crept around corners until I spotted the food gate. There were thirty, maybe thirty five strides over there, but right at the kitchen door stood two of the kitchen workers in the midst of their break. The smoke of their cigarettes wafted toward me, but they appeared otherwise oblivious to anything but the baguette in their hands. My stomach growled and I pinched it to silence.

I could either make a mad dash for the gates or try to walk over there slowly. After weighing my options, I chose the second and began my journey.

 

One, two, three steps. Were they looking? No, they were busy talking about the 'disgraceful teacher'.

 

Eight, nine. One of them coughed and I nearly jerked into a run. My muscles tensed, expecting a howl after me. No, I had to keep walking.

 

Twelve, thirteen. Almost there, almost there. If they caught a kid with two suitcases on his way out of campus, they wouldn't let it slide as just a small excursion to the grocery store.

 

Eighteen, nineteen, twen... “Hey!” someone shouted, “Where do you think you're going”

The pent-up adrenaline in my body released itself and my legs thundered against the ground faster than I thought was humanly possible. The guitar case bruised my legs, but I didn't care. I couldn't stop. The gravel crunched behind me as the kitchen worker, huffing and puffing, dragged her corpus after me. A bright light tore through the sky and blinded me momentarily, had me stumbling in my path and her after me.

“You there! Stop!”

Even with the luggage I ran faster than her. Soon I no longer heard her, but for safety measures I kept running. My lungs burned, begging for release, but if I slowed down, the lactic acid in my legs would pull me under and launch me down the hill until grass and mud filled my mouth as my teeth scraped off a row of dirt.

The air chilled around me, and the wind caught at my clothes. Its howl felt like someone jammed a fork into my ear. Despite my lungs hissing and muscles screaming, I forced myself to continue. Not until I neared the outline of the town did I slow down, and even then I still kept up a steady jog at the inner edge of the sidewalk to avoid the streetlights and any attention.

 

 

I passed neon-lit gas stations and drunks outside of liquor stores. A few people waded through the streets, and none of them were police officers, at least not in uniform, but still I constantly looked over my shoulders to make sure no one followed me. My cases evoked suspicion. People didn't leave this town; no one needed luggage. Unless you were a stranger, an unwanted presence or both. I wanted to pull down my hood and shield my face, but doing so required that I let go of my things; it meant that I had to stop and it would ease the job of discovering me for the police and school staff.

Had the kitchen workers told anyone? What about Spencer? My friends probably all lounged in the library or in bed, crammed in their notes and worried about the SATs (unknown hours away), not me. I should have left something, I thought, as I passed a one of the places that sold trinkets and souvenir crap. Gilded sea shells and plastic luau girls waved in tune to a soundless music box inside the shop, where a Halloween garland still hung in the window. I allowed myself one glance at it before I curved into an unlit alley and paced through it as fast as possible. A shaggy orange cat hissed and shot past me up into an open window.

 

I slowed down eventually, but only because I had no  clue about my location . I scouted the streets for a motel until I found one that read “vacant rooms.” Probably only because the  ' no ' sign  had broken, but I took that as a sign that they always had vacant rooms. A bell  above  the front door jingled Christmas melodies as I entered the lobby, which  someone had decorated  with  buffalo skulls and kitsch metal plaques reading clich é es like  _ Money isn't everything. There's Mastercard and Visa _ and  _ If you're smoking in here, you'd better be on fire!  _ They probably bought their interior decoration at that souvenir store.

As I trudged through the lobby, I almost  tripped over a bucket placed to collect raindrops through a leak in the roof. A worn-down beige carpet with suspicious brown stains covered the floor and clashed with the mint green tapestry, which peeled off in places to reveal red bricks behind. The clerk behind the desk pulsed on his cigarillo without looking up as I entered. He continued to flip through an old  _ Sport's  _ _ Illustrated _ , even when I asked him if there were any vacant rooms.

“Are ya stupid kid? Look at this place, there's always vacant rooms.”

“I'd like one.” I fiddled with a fifty from my parental envelope-cash. “How much?”

“Twenty eight,” he drawled. Upon inspecting my appearance, he flashed me half a set of missing teeth where the rest matched his carpet. “If you don't want me callin' up that school of yours, let's round that up to thirty, huh?”

Once again my boarding school brand shone through, but I willingly paid the price when the rain began pouring through the small hole in the roof and clamored into the bucket.

“There's two bathrooms if you need a shower, but unfortunately for you neither are connected to your room and the water hasn't been warm for half a decade. It'd be warmer to step out in the rain and pay the indecent exposure fine.” He cackled and handed me the key to room thirteen.

I dragged my luggage up the stairs and into a hallway in an even worse state than the lobby. Only one of the light bulbs from the ceiling worked, and the farther I went, the less it illuminated. A mattress squeaked rhythmically inside one of the rooms, followed by a woman's low moaning and grunts from what could only have been a four hundred pound warthog. I skimmed the numbers with my eyes in the darkness without desire to touch the walls and the vermin that undoubtedly lived inside them.

Finally I found number thirteen and inserted the key into the lock. No matter how much I wiggled it around, the door was jammed shut worse than the one in the bell tower. It didn't dawn on me that I had the wrong room until someone yanked open the door from inside.

“This is my – oh,” he said.

The dim ceiling lamp shone just enough for me to make out the shape of his face and his fingers braced against the door frame. It couldn't possibly be him but of course it was; of course he had never left town when all his belongings where still at Saint Franklin's, but he wasn't in some jail cell either; he was right there in front of me.

“What are you doing here?” I tried to listen for hostility or relief in his voice, but he just sounded tired.

“They... um, I had to leave. And sleep somewhere. I had room thirteen, I thought that was yours but it wasn't. I'm sorry, it's probably the next one.”

His eyes flitted to both sides of the empty hall before they landed on the wall behind me. “It probably is, yeah.” And with this he was about to close the door forever. I couldn't let that happen.

“But I heard it's bad luck to sleep in number thirteen and with this place's electricity and security, I'm not sure if that's safe. I don't really want to try and find it either in case it's in the other end of the hallway. Can I just, crash in your room for the night? On the floor?”

After that I would be gone, I swore. I just needed one last conversation, I just needed  some form of  closure _.  _

Ryan sighed and inspected both ends of the hallway again. Then he retreated on the moldy carpet and allowed me to follow him inside.

 

...

 

The motel room wasn't half bad. In the middle of it was a king size bed devoid of stains and dead flies (those were all inside the ceiling lamp). The floor had no carpet, but upon inspecting the bathroom (suspiciously clean, possibly a recent crime scene), I caught sight of a few towels I could sleep on if necessary. Who knew, maybe we'd end up fighting so badly that I had to make use of room thirteen after all. I placed my luggage close to the door. If Ryan had noticed the guitar case, he said nothing, and why would he say anything about that anyway? If we ever got to the point where we could conduct a civil conversation, it would most likely be about anything but musical instruments.

He locked the door and sat next to the writing desk. He removed his shoes, those pointy leather ones, and folded his legs to fit on the small wooden stool. “Did you track me down here?”

I shook my head and crossed the room to the bed. It was far too bulky for my taste, and on top of the duvet was a suspicious yellow stain. The pillow concealed a chocolate bar, but I was no longer hungry and dared not risk a bite in case it had been in the room before Ryan arrived. Instead I devoured the sight of the scraggly beard he had grown while away, the shadows under his eyes and the purple tint to his lips.

“My sister told me what happened,” I finally said. “At her college.”

The stool creaked when he turned toward me. There was something pitiful in his voice and posture, like a stray dog curbed by weather and too little affection. “You have to understand, I wouldn't lay a hand on her. Wouldn't lay a hand on anyone. I don't know why she told them that. I'm not a rapist, I was just so incredibly stupid. And young. The worst part was, she actually had me wondering if I did it, no, I mean, of course I didn't, but what if she really felt I pushed it too far? I don't know what's wrong with me.” At this point his sentences blurred together, impossible to discern from one another, and he was no longer talking to me, if he even had been from the beginning.

What happened between them was none of my business, and I felt a twinge of regret. I shouldn't have come here; I should have kept Ryan in my memory and walked down to room thirteen. Then again the knowledge that he slept two doors away would drive me crazy and I would get no sleep of my own.

He bent over the table so the knobs in his spine showed in the fly-spotted lamplight underneath the thin t-shirt. “I wish I could wipe the slate with something, but nothing in here is clean enough for the fucking job,” he coughed. “You have every right to hate me, I get that. This, all of this, it was just a cruel coincidence.”

This was the point in my life where I had to decide if I believed in coincidences. He kept talking; I might as well not have been there, and he might have been talking to himself all these days spent locked up in a decaying motel room, muttering “sorry” over and over again until his voice broke.

“How did the police find out about us? Who told them? I know I didn't. Spencer didn't, even if he found out about us. I don't think it was that woman either.”

“No one told. The police found evidence.”

“What evidence?”

“Your blazer. It was that day the headmaster came by.” He looked so desolate, I wanted to put my arms around him, but at the same time I was afraid of touching him, as if he could contaminate me with something more dangerous than any physical illness.

“I'm a terrible, terrible person,” he said, voice cracked but crystal clear like a broken wineglass.

After everything that had happened, I couldn't really argue with that, but Christ, he looked so fragile, I feared the fan might blow him away. If he went outside in the storm, it definitely would sweep him up and crash him into a wall or something. The wind roared past the fire escape outside, tossed laundry and potted plants from the balconies before smashed them in the back alley, carrying the debris with it.

“Lay down,” I said, surprised at myself and when he obliged. He kept his hands and eyes to himself, never touched me, never looked at me.

“They have your jacket running through the lab now. I don't even know why I'm still here. I guess I was just hoping it would never happen. That I could get my job back and finally work in a place where, even if it didn't make me happy, I was at least content. It's not like I had anywhere else, right, and even with all its budget issues, Saint Franklin's was a nice workplace. Nice kids, decent pay. And now I lost that, too.”

Without anything else for consolation, I handed him the chocolate bar. He unwrapped it, broke off a square and gave it to me. The sweet taste filled my mouth but not my stomach.

I asked him what he expected me to say. If he wanted me to say “it wasn't your fault,” when it was, like that night in the forest where I wanted him to say those words to me. Would it have helped me then? No, because I still had to flee the school to avoid imprisonment. So I said nothing to him.

“I know it's my fault. I'm just trying to figure out if it was worth it.”

“What do you mean by 'worthit'?”

“Here's the deal.” With a heavy sigh, he handed me back the chocolate bar and repeated “this is how it is: in ten years, this won't matter to you. It'll be that story you tell your friends and colleagues when you're drunk. You say, 'in high school I had an affair with my teacher' and they laugh because that's outrageous. You're such a nice guy, they'd never think you had it in you. Who knows, maybe it was just a joke to break the ice. Maybe it even comes up at your first real job interview and your possible boss says 'aren't you that kid from that story a few years ago,' provided you get a job in Arizona. No one cares what happened out of state; they won't even know. It was just another story in some paper. But don't worry, he'll still laugh about it and hire you because the details don't matter, they're short of staff and you look like a capable dude.”

I nodded, subduing the urge to bounce off the bed and scream “stop pitying yourself”. Maybe we weren't some scandal. Maybe we just happened and external circumstances blew us out of proportion in the eyes of other people. We were no different from every other botched relationship on this planet.

“But for me,” Ryan said, “this case, my arrest, you and me, it's a whole different story. It's one of those scary tales you tell your kids like 'don't do drugs,' or 'masturbation makes you blind'. I can't get a job; I'm the guy who had an affair with not only one but two students, not only two students but two fucking siblings. My job opportunities are in the gutter. Even if I do get a job, some place with high school kids who just don't give a shit any more, their parents will still watch me and my colleagues refuse to sit with me in the canteen because yes, I am that guy. I'll be that guy until my death.” He followed this statement with a bitter laughter, not even half a chuckle.

My teeth broke the skin on my lower lip, and I licked away the blood. The need to ask him fizzed up inside me after having been bottled up for days. That one question, the only thing that didn't add up to his self-sorry alibi. “When you met me and heard who I was, what did you think? I mean, what went through your head?”

“Shock, definitely. I wanted to run as far as possible out of that office, but to tell you the truth, I was so desperate for a job, I didn't care. You were just another student. I had to talk to you, what, three times tops?”

No, it wasn't just Ryan's fault. If I had only left him alone, we wouldn't be thigh-deep in the biggest mess since I accidentally killed Peter Sharp. But the difference between us was that I never knew about him and Kara. If I'd known, I never would have touched him. Maybe even killed him, for real, on purpose. I told him this, and he said he couldn't help it, and then the quiet reigned once again.

“So why'd you do it?” I crumbled up the candy wrapper and threw it to the floor. The fan caught it and blew the trash around in the air for a bit before it emitted a miserable sound and stopped working. The wrapper landed on the carpet, out of sight. “Why'd you repeat something you knew cost you your reputation and would land you in prison if you did it again? I don't mean to condescend, but it sounds to me like you're either painfully stupid or suffer from amnesia. Are you some kind of masochist?”

“I guess you could say that.” He looked at me sideways in between shakes of his head. He smiled his crooked not-smile, and the right side of his face twitched deceptively. “But no, that's not it. I guess that, for lack of a better word, I fell in love with you.”

I blinked, once, but when I re-opened my eyes, he had already turned his gaze to the ceiling and the colony of deceased bugs in the lamp. His confession filled the air with unspoken excuses and contradictions, but it didn't fill me with the peace of mind it should have. My skin felt like it was on fire, or like the bugs in the lamp had come alive underneath my skin, buzzing, in sharp hums repeating his words, that one word too big for my mouth to repeat it, so very still and softly, I asked: “what about now?”

“I don't know,” he said. His thumb rubbed circles into my wrist, soft lilac bruises that would leave before I discovered them tomorrow. “If I was, I mean. I don't want to be only because it justifies my actions. That's not a good enough reason to love anything.”

Once again I said nothing.

A while later he said “But if I genuinely was in love with a minor, I guess it's a good thing I'm going to jail. Because I am.”

Are what? The question pressed against my teeth on the tip of my tongue. Are what? In love with a minor or going to jail? I bit my lips to stay silent,  _ you fuck it up when you talk.  _ If he stopped veiling his words in fancy phrasings, maybe some time I'd receive a real answer from him. A simple  ' yes ' or  ' n o' as unavoidable as the fact that everyone would die and that the earth orbited the sun.  I curled up on the bed, curled around him and he let me because death and jail was inevitable and I had missed him so much  that  it ached in my teeth.

 

I woke intertwined with his limbs. His arm splayed across my chest, the other curled round my neck and his lips pressed to my shoulder. The connection made a swooping sound when he pulled away, startled and heavy-lidded from sleep. He most likely hadn't slept at all while he stayed here.

“You shouldn't be here,” he croaked, “you have your test, the... that's today, it's today, I'm sorry, I forgot.”

“Hey,” I nudged him with my elbow. “You're not my teacher anymore. It's not your problem.”

“But you have to go to college,” he urged (2 hours until the SATs).

“I can't really do that,” I said, grimacing. After last night I had forgotten all about why I actually came down to the hotel. “See, you're not the only one who's going to jail.”

He propped himself up on one elbow and frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Yesterday, two officers came asking for me. They've found out about Sharp.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don't, but why else would they come? I haven't committed any other crimes.” Aside from the drugs, but that was mostly on Spencer, whose varieties of _where the fuck are you?!?!?!_ lit up my phone as I spoke.

Ryan shielded his head in his palms, fell face first on the mattress and groaned. “They obviously wanted to question you about me. You left school because of  _ that _ ? They have no idea Sharp's death wasn't an accident, you idiot!”

Well.

Well, fuck.

Given this little technical detail, I had just followed through with the most enormously idiotic plan of my whole life, but it was too much to face this early in the morning. I ignored the insult and asked if he was sure.

“One hundred percent positive. I overheard the chief down at the station. They're closing that case to focus on more important things, such as teachers who molest their students.”

Oh.  _ Oh _ . The clock ticked away, one and a half hour until the SATs began. “Do you think I could still make it up there?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Would you wait for me? We can take the train, the two pm train,” I said, because we could; we could buy tickets on the station and by then it'd be too late for the police to find us and we'd go to Flagstaff or Phoenix and figure out where we'd go after there, we really, actually could. I would complete the SATs like planned, but what really mattered was that I had somewhere to go afterward. Someone would wait for me and congratulate me and genuinely care instead of handing me a credit card and letting me loose in lonely celebration. We'd find some other hotel and I had my savings and it was all going to be fine, everything was finally working out, and in my exaltation I stumbled over my own breathing so violently, Ryan had to pat me on the back.

Before he had time to reply, someone knocked on the door. It seemed to come from someone with a fist the size of a cauldron and it sent shivers of the worst kind down my spine. The booming voice that followed even more so, and judging from Ryan's face, he experienced the same dread as me.

“Ryan Ross? Open up, it's the police.”

Everything in fast forward: Ryan bolted for his suitcase and slammed the lid shut. He furiously paced around to fetch his shoes, hop-scotched in an attempt to dress himself, and gestured at me to leave, even though a policeman the size of the motel mattress blocked the only exit. “Mr. Ross, we know you're in there. You're under arrest for statutory rape. Please open the door and follow us to the station and we'll press no further charges. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you can and say will be used you in a court of law.”

The storm rattled the windows and floors, drowned out the officer's voice and Ryan's commotion. Just when you think you're neck deep in a grave of mud, you find out the mud is actually feces and you're cuffed by both your wrists and ankles.

I held my breath. He scrambled for a pair of socks, which he stuffed in his pocket. He dashed from the bathroom and the bureau to the bed, tripped past me and gripped me by the collar to steady himself.

“I can't go to prison, I can't.” He reeked even worse than the motel room of stale alcohol and desperation. “I have to leave.”

“I'll come with you,” I said in one breath. Of course I would; I had no physical home but the space in his arms. He shook his head and began undoing the window screws.

“No, you need to return to the school and participate in the test. You can still make it if you leave now.” He wheezed at the extortion, yet had only managed to unbolt one screw. The police officer outside banged one more time.

“But I'll never see you again.” I doubt he heard me when the storm raged outside. The wood of the door cracked a little under the officer's fist, and this only spurred Ryan on further. He looked around the room, grabbed the wooden stool from the night before and placed it on the glass. With three steps backward he measured the distance, then another step and a hissed “You _have_ to take those SATs. If not, you've wasted four years of your life on nothing.”

“But it doesn't matter.” My voice cracked in an unsuccessful attempt at not yelling. “I don't care about the fucking SATs; I care about you.”

Ryan jammed the stool into the window, but it only cracked a little. The door began splintering at the top and a long-wound scar formed near the upper frame. He jammed the stool again and again, until finally the glass broke off in huge pieces that fell out of the window. With the legs of the stool he removed the most hazardous ones, then threw the duvet over the windowsill. He tossed his suitcase out first, then crawled atop the table underneath the sill and turned to face me with a pained expression.

“Mr. Ross, open up immediately,” the officer roared. The wind outside howled and tore at Ryan's hair. One of the glass shards had cut him across his cheekbone, and a drop of blood trickled down his face.

The crack lamented and shot rapidly half-way down the door.

The police officer yelled: “Open the god damn door, or I'll kick it in.”

Ryan pleaded: “promise me you'll take that test, just promise me. Don't let one coincidence ruin your whole future.”

With these words he jumped onto the fire escape and slithered down from it. The crack in the door reached the carpet and I turned around to see Mr. Police officer's beefy arm jerk at the door handle. Contrary to the velocity of my surroundings, some kind of internal calm filled me. If there was such a thing as clarity – and I don't mean some ethereal vision or spiritual guidance, just no more clutter and tangled wires inside my brain – I experienced it.

This is the point in my life where I have to decide if I believe in coincidences.

This isn't a standardized quiz. You receive no piece of paper and when you're done, no one else tells you whether your pick was right or wrong. The moment you choose, there's only one right answer and it decides the rest of your life until you encounter a new question. The police officer barges in and I follow in Ryan's steps, hurling my suitcase at the ground and hooking my guitar case under my right arm. I slide down the fire escape at the speed of light and as I rush past inches of metal, my choice slowly erases my other options before my eyes.

My feet hit the pavement with a hollow thud that shakes my bones. I pick up the now battered designer suitcase and begin running. Ryan's outline is two hundred yards ahead of me and I sprint after him until I reach the point where my lungs beg for mercy, and then I keep going. The luggage knocks at my knees, at my thighs and calves as I pace the sidewalks like a marathon runner, shoving dogs and elderly people out of my way. In the distance sirens wail. They grow louder and louder the closer I get to Ryan and the train station and the awaiting train, leading god knows where as long as it's far away.

The wind chucks leaves and pebbles in my face, pieces of the town that dissolves around me. The people I pass no longer have faces; they're pink and green blurs of a past I never have to touch again, so I sprint and I sprint to reach that train. It's so close I can taste the fuel.

Ryan stumbles on his feet outside its doors. He turns around at the sound of the sirens and catches sight of me, and his face changes into something I can't tell what is because everything moves so fast. But he presses his leg between the automatic doors in the train while I push myself those extra percent of my capacity they say a person never utilizes.

The sirens are right in my ear and the train is twenty feet away. The train station thunders away under my feet, and the police officers tumble out of their car, crying out at me to stop, but the train is ten, nine, eight feet away and like a bike without brakes, I crash into Ryan and force open the doors. We tumble inside and our cases follow. The doors slide closed. The police skids to a halt right outside and we get to watch their disbelief fade away as the train gains speed.

 

...

 

Ryan gasps for breath, if possible even more than me. My body has yet to accept that it can breathe again. “I told you,” he pants, “to go back to the school”

“Then why'd you hold the doors for me?”

He doesn't reply to this. He grabs my collar and stabilizes me against a wall full of pamphlets about safety measures. His mouth rediscovers mine and pries apart my lips. I relax into the wall, my legs the consistency of Saint Franklin's tomato soup, and allow this humble apology intermittent with small breaks because neither of us can stay breathless for extended periods of time.

Other people pass while we sit in the connecting link between two compartments. They stare at our windswept hair, and I'm happy that I no longer wear any parts of my uniform. I'm free of the boarding school brand and whichever new reason for their staring doesn't matter.

 

We hide in the bathroom while the inspector checks other people's tickets. The compartment is so small that our stuff has to stand on the toilet and in the sink while we're squashed up against the frosted window.

“Do you have any idea where this train is going?” I ask, and he shakes his head, still smiling.

“No, but I really don't mind.”

We stay like this for a long time. Who even knows how often the ticket controller comes around. It's better to be safe than sorry, I say, and then I tell Ryan Pete's story about the man whose bladder broke in the middle of a train.

I fuck it up when I talk. If I shut up half the times I wanted to ask something, maybe right now I would be sitting in a warm room at Saint Franklin's, sweating over a test and I might not even know the first name of my English teacher.

But I do. I made a choice, and I know his last name and his first name and his real first name, I know his scent, that he slept with my sister, the small noises he makes in his sleep, and I know how much older than me he is, and I know that I'm stupid for throwing away my education, but there are no coincidences, no accidents, no fate. There is only choice, and while I may have made the biggest mistake of my life, I'm happy I made it.

After a while I pick up my phone from the front pocket in my suitcase. It's almost devoid of power and I no longer have a cord for it. Spencer has sent me so many messages that my inbox can't fit any more, and I should answer them but I don't know what to say. I look at the clock and decide to reply later since he's unavailable due to the SATs anyway (-30 minutes left). Ryan toys with my hair behind me and kisses the spot behind my ear where no amount of combing can cover the long-faded hickeys. The stale odor of the fact that we're standing in a public train bathroom reaches my nostrils as I scroll through my contact list until I find the letter J.

I should have done  this a long time ago, but I was a big arrogant asshole. After hovering my finger above the 'call' button  for long enough , I finally dial Jon's number six months later than I promised. The train whistles past cacti, cattle and yet another gloomy looking tornado: the last of Arizona's landmarks I ever have to see.

 


	13. Epilogue

Two months later Ryan and I are in Salinas, California. He carries a basket of the freshest organic grapefruits possible from the local market over his right arm. Our voices tear through the velvet night: we howl obscenities and giggle into each others' necks, and we're no longer teacher and student; we're two drunk morons with a basket full of grapefruits in a graveyard on a Friday night, and I think it's late August or early September, but I just can't bring myself to care.

In the basket next to the fruit is a bolt cutter, and Ryan now hoists it up with clumsy movements. A few grapefruits tumble to the ground, and I pick them up to check if they're damaged. Hurt and bruised. There is a loud metallic clank followed by a crisp crack before we slip past the gates.

We stalk the cemetery in search for that one name. I can't see much; I forgot my contact lenses in the car.

I have no high school degree. Kara has informed me of our parents' anger: the exact nuance of plum on our dad's face when he heard of my little motel stunt, the amount of times my mom has sighed “that boy was doomed from birth.” They withhold my college fund until I finally pick a university and complete those SATs, which will be never or next week, depending on what I feel when I wake up tomorrow.

Finally we discover the grave, and Ryan yanks at my shirt and brings me to a halt in front of a measly gray stone worn down by age. He hands me a grapefruit, which I, despite my impaired vision, manage to hurl at the stone where its peel cracks and spray pale pulp on the engraved _John_ _Steinbeck_ _1_ _902_ _-19_ _68_

Ryan sets the basket on the ground and grabs a fruit. With the precision of a baseball pitcher he chucks it at the grave so fiercely that the wet splat causes a nearby dog to tug at its chains and bark. Again and again we throw grapefruits at the grave and each other until there's peel under my nails and I reek of citrus. Ryan has pulp in his hair and his smile is brighter than the moon above us.

Something rustles in the bushes behind us, and we turn around just in time to catch the sweeping cone of yellow from someone's flashlight. Ryan first pulls me flat to the ground, then tells me to duck. We crawl forward on our stomachs in the damp grass, behind a bush and into a crouched position. The basket remains in front of the grave, and Ryan curses under his breath.

“There goes our breakfast,” he says.

“And our bolt cutter.”

He shoots me an odd look. “Why would we need a bolt cutter outside of this mission?”

Before I can answer, the person with the flashlight stops two graves away from us. They shine the light right at Steinbeck's grave and mutter something about “damn kids” and “Halloween isn't yet, is it?” Then they shuffle off and Ryan points to the gate at the other end of the cemetery.

He wants us to make a run for it and I nearly laugh because the gate is locked and our weapon is slowly moving fifty feet away from us in the hands of a gardener.

Ryan gets into position to sprint toward the gate and my heartbeat picks up. Now? He forms his hands into a platform and nods at my feet. As the broken front gate rattles upon its close, Ryan bolts up and his long legs hit the ground like drumsticks, faster and faster with me on his tail. It reminds me of my last day at Saint Franklin's and as the gardener shouts after us, “freeze! Stop right there or I'll call the police”, I think of the poor kitchen worker and the admonishing headmaster Daniels must have given her, if he even allowed her to work at the school for long enough to utter a single word in her direction.

Ryan stops right at the brick wall and crouches again. I wobble on one leg but manage to plant my sneaker securely in his hands, so he can lift me to the edge where I'm supposed to help him up because I'm the strongest despite all of his pilates, not that he's practiced for the past few months. The pilates ball is still in Annex G at Saint Franklin's Boarding School for Adolescent Boys. As I balance on the ledge of the wall, I become a beacon for the searchlight, which catches sight of me right as I kneel to pull Ryan up by his arms. He's so tall that his fingertips almost reach my toes anyway. He takes off from a bush, so I can haul him up, and now we're both on the ledge, illuminated by half a dozen flashlights like two very agile deers.

How the hell did the police arrive so quickly?

I'm the first to dash down the ledge. It's wider than it looks from below, but it still demands a certain amount of coordination skills on my behalf.

“Hurry up,” Ryan yells. Several times, actually. The police are shouting at us to come down so they can call our parents. I laugh, not because Ryan is an adult who hasn't spoken to his parents for years, but because of how great it would feel to knock my dad down off his front-runner pedestal with a headline about my arrest.

But I don't need to fuck shit up for attention.

Spencer sounds in my head, _I know you, that's why you do all this crap._

Not anymore.

Ryan has stopped and reaches out a hand for me to grab before we jump into the shrubbery below. It tears and scratches my skin but has no thorns, and soon we're on our feet in the direction of our car. I rented the rusty pick-up truck for the both of us because Ryan is technically still wanted for statutory rape in Arizona and can't use any of his credit cards to attract attention.

When will that die out? It's not like he's wanted for murder. They'll give up soon enough, at least I tell myself that, but the credit cards don't matter; I have plenty of money to last us for a long while.

We hurl ourselves into the cabin of the car and Ryan slams the door shut behind us. With frantic hands he manages to rev up the engine and back the vehicle into the shrubbery before it gains speed and we swerve onto someone's corn field.

And we're on the run again.

 

_Fin._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ....ok now i'm really done

**Author's Note:**

> Updates every Monday evening GMT+1, I just posted this one early because today was my birthday :~)


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